


until the flowers bloom (how much longing has to fall like snow)

by dark_lilac_expanse



Category: Monsta X (Band), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, Fantasy, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Gen, M/M, Magic, Multiple Pairings, Other, POV Alternating, Slow Burn, Violence, War, poly!OT7
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-02 07:51:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21158177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dark_lilac_expanse/pseuds/dark_lilac_expanse
Summary: The chess pieces are scattered across the universe now. For the spring game to start, they have to find each other.The Prince : Maybe I'll never fly (but you have to)The Tief : Go tell the Shadows I'm yours nowThe Sunlight : For I will never go darkThe Leader : If I find you, I find myselfThe Cursed : Teach me how to be a BlessingThe Rebel : Take the Air with youThe Failure : You throw me to the wolves (I come back leading the pack)(BTS in a fantasy setting, with magic, powers, element control (Avatar: The Last Airbender inspired), familiars (His Dark Materials inspired), kings, princes, orphans and an epic battle against the powers of darkness.They will need an Army.But first, they have to find each other.)





	1. How it was and will never be again - When you leave (you take the air with you)

**Author's Note:**

> I have neglected this story for the longest time, and I have no excuse for it except that life got complicated and I forgot how much joy I had creating this universe. BUT! Recently, I have fallen in love with it again and wrote out the next few chapters. I will try to post updates as regularly as I manage, and I promise I will write it up as fast as it happens in my own head.  
To anyone who read this and is coming back to it now, after almost a year - I appreciate you and your time spent on reading this, and I am so sorry for making you wait.  
For anyone who stumbled upon this little story of mine right now - welcome!  
You can find me here: https://darklilacexpanse.tumblr.com , which is a tumblr following this fanfic and will have some additional info and details, AND A MAP of the world (pinned post)! Come talk to me!
> 
> Author Note: This has several pairings at the start, continues out through several more and will build up towards a poly!OT7!
> 
> **Warning: There are some difficult topics, including but not limited to family violence, abuse, neglect, general violence, torture, etc. If there is a trigger here that I skipped and you think it is better written in the summary, let me know please! Thank you!******

** _1.1. Jimin / When you leave (you take the air with you)_ **

**** __   


There is a legend in the Waterlands, an old story about a man who loved his home so much that he drowned in it when the water came, and the Ocean Gods didn’t claim him when Death brought him to their domain, for his devotion impressed them. They let him stay in drowned walls forever, an empty shell of a soul that never had an ending. The Water Folk called him the Claimed Man, a cursed soul that remains between the Gods and the Folk, to guard and haunt alike.

When he was a child, Jimin had nightmares of drowning, over and over again, until _he_ was the empty dead thing floating in the darkness and there was nothing, no light or sound or sense. His mother said it is a fear too terrible for a child to have. Jimin always thought that meant that it is a reasonable one, an adult fear trapped between the bones of a child, and the terror never stopped.

His father told him the story of how it came to be, the Fear. He was two years old and Jansu was only a cub that could fit under Jimin’s armpit when they cuddled. But Jansu was Jimin’s and he adored the otter ever since she was given to him. Chasing her, he slipped off into the Great River, off the bank close to the Big Mouth and it was minutes before anyone attending the royal picnic noticed they can’t hear Jimin laughing. Jansu was howling in pain somewhere when his mother and father ran over, but there was nothing but an otter cub splashing on the surface of the water when they looked. In his own, logical way, the Water King never understood how Jimin could not just bend the water to his will, how it seeped through and fizzled or froze over him and how could he not avoid it, being the Prince of the Waterlands and scared of his own home. They were royalty, but beyond that, they were Water Folk, and they didn’t drown by accident. The shimmering expanse in front of them was their best friend.

And yet, his own child, his _heir_ almost drowned that day on the banks of the Great River. He would have died, father told him, but his mother grew restless of waiting for him to come up and parted the water like a woman about to deliver a lecture to a regular Water Folk diving prodigy about worrying his parents. Later, Jimin thought how the connection he had to mother always **did** seem so much stronger than the one with father, for she must have heard or felt somehow that the impossible was happening.

When the rivulets parted, on the bottom of the river bed, wrapped in kelp and resting on rocks like a little angel, was Jimin’s lifeless body. It took four royal healers to bring him back.

Jimin could never explain, to any of his tutors in Water Control how he just couldn’t (not like them) part and split and go through, for the water didn’t listen to him. And if the water wouldn’t, _why_ should the Water Folk, his father said. Mother said a lot more with silence, tragedy of a first born that couldn’t live like his people did. He sometimes imagined that she hears him screaming, dying, drowning over and over again, and that is the sound she can’t possibly comprehend hearing, so she keeps quiet, as still as possible, so maybe the silence would tell her _how_. Why it had to be her child and how can she ever love it completely when it came to her so like an angel and yet cursed by a demon.

They called it a Curse of the Heir. Jimin heard people whisper about it long before the bolder told him directly. He was supposed to be claimed by the water that day, an anomaly washed away to live with the Ocean Gods, but the love and devotion of a desperate mother saved him.

How he wanted to laugh in their faces, the little prince that was not good enough for his own kingdom. The Curse was his life and no warmth of motherly love could save him from the cold, gaping loneliness of the simultaneously trapped and exiled. His mother was cursed too, with failure and rejection of Folk that couldn’t understand why she didn’t let him go, for the Gods asked for him. And his father too, by choices and a crown that weighed too heavy on his head to recall the love.

When father married a woman that could give him _proper_ Water Children, mother prolonged her silences into eternity and prayed, forever prayed, on banks and shores and sometimes far away in the ocean itself. For deliverance, forgiveness, a new chance, a new life, a new child. Jimin never told either of them about what he saw on the river bed that day, the darkness and hands stretched out to grab him, bony and white from the shimmering nothing. He said it only to one of his Water Control tutors, years later, ashamed to fail at yet another lesson. Asked how it felt under, how it was to drown, Jimin looked in the eyes of the old man and told him that it is the Claimed Man that called for him, hungry for his flesh, because even that demon wanted an heir and a replacement. The sound of laughter of a wise old man that weathered storms and battled whales will forever stay with Jimin, disbelief and dismissal wrapped in a serving of self-loathing.

The Cursed Heir was stubbornly attached to the Earth, no matter how many times they pushed him to go back to water, control or give up. He would try, over and over again, for mother, for father, for the Folk. But no matter what, the Fear combed through his efforts like they were futile and the only salvation came to be Jansu, the familiar otter that still cried for him, pushing him up and above towards the light until he survived another day.

It would have been the saddest life of them all, Jimin thought sometimes, wrapped up in misery and cold blankets, if Taehyung didn’t arrive in it.

And oh, what an entrance that was.

The Wind Lords lived across the water, and thus together with the Water Folk that could cross that ocean. Jimin couldn’t, but that didn’t stop the Lord and his wife and children visiting, as often as they could fly (and the Air Commanders could fly whenever they wanted). Jimin’s father said it is a marriage they are seeking to accomplish, heir to an heir, but to a _true_ Water Prince, not a misfit in the ranks. So, Jimin met the Wind Lords of relevance only two times, when the older prince was brought to be introduced to the court, and then again when the true heirs of the Water Folk were of age. Jimin’s brother and sister were twins as lovely as they were distant to their Cursed brother.

Generally, Jimin was ignored on meetings of such kind, and when he was of age and saw the Wind Prince again, Jimin couldn’t help but feel relief that there was no betrothal to add to the weight on his shoulders.

Sunghyun was the picture of a dreamy prince from stories his nannies giggled about, royal, gifted and beautiful. But he looked at his perspective spouses like he is searching for a spark, a sign, for the skies to open and angels to sing. He obviously lived somewhere in the clouds, figuratively and literally, and while gentle fairytales were possible if you were to be an heir to a title with adequate heritage, it was not the kind of a lie that Jimin would ever let himself trust in. Real life was something much different than what Sunghyun wanted and what he would ultimately get. Of course, when he was younger, and thirteen-year-old Sunghyun was first introduced to the Water Folk Court, there was a sense of tragedy in all of this. And then, a year later, when Jimin was eight and still feeling rather offended that he is getting ignored at all these meetings, incomprehensible politics and marriage discussions aside, the Wind Lord came to visit on an urgent matter. And this time his third child came with him, the unburdened and joyful Taehyung.

It would have always fallen into place, Jimin thought. Taehyung and him were the same age and understood each other so deeply and devotedly that it might as well have been written in the stars. But the meeting itself, well…

Father wanted him to not show his face at the Court during the visit, perhaps afraid the Wind Lord would suddenly remember the Cursed Heir and somehow change his mind on a betrothal planned in more than a decade, when Jimin’s younger siblings were of age. So Jimin went swimming, as usual, and he started sinking, as usual, waiting for the last kick of panic to push him up from the cold terror of the sea bottom, when Taehyung showed up.

The Third Wind Prince didn’t know nor did he care that Jimin was Cursed, he saw him drowning and jumped in to save him, forgetting that he is in the realm of people who should not be able to die in water. And just like that, there was a bubble of air around Jimin’s head, forced underwater by someone who could command it to his will and he could _breathe_. In surprise, he coughed and pushed away, terrified of what was holding him so tightly, but Taehyung held him firmly and stubbornly kicked towards the surface, until there was sun and a hand holding his.

Jansu was in a panic next to them, trying to protect her human, but Taehyung paid her no mind. Gently, he pulled Jimin’s face towards his and stared at him, assessing. Later, Jimin would awake from dreams most often by seeing the face of that Wind Folk child, smile of diamonds and eyes of honest, sparkling devotion.

They were inseparable after that. And a miracle was that they were allowed to be. Jimin was forgotten in his own home and Taehyung didn’t have a particular purpose in his, so they built a home in each other. Jimin explained to his father that Taehyung was his best friend, and father stared at him like it won’t change a thing, because Taehyung didn’t come with titles and alliance possibilities. He just… was.

But oh, how alive and magical and perfectly free he was. Jimin learned, day by day and visit by visit, how magnificently the air and reality could bend around Taehyung, with no more drowning and disbelief and shame and curses. Just two boys that were friends, forever, devoted and true and, maybe for the first time in his life, Jimin relied on someone.

Now, almost a decade later, that reliance was about to hurt him, more than anything ever did before.

“They are going to keep you as a hostage?”, Jimin asked, hugging a pillow close, because Taehyung was across the room and didn’t want to be touched.

“Political representative of the Wind Folk. But yes, it will essentially be a hostage situation. Father says that I will be allowed to travel unsupervised though.”, he said, looking somewhere past Jimin and into the distance through the window.

  
“Do you… do you have to go?”, Jimin asked, keeping his voice still enough to fool lesser people.

Not Taehyung though.He was Jimin’s soulmate, his everything, he knew him better than Jansu did and sometimes, when the sunset over the water fell just right on Taehyung riding away among the waves, on the back of his familiar, an orca called Tiny, forever leaving so he could come back the next time, Jimin honestly believed Taehyung loved him too.

“Jimin. Darling, look at me.”, and he scooped his resigned head between his long, slim fingers and made him look.

“I will be back. I promise you. I swear on my life, on the life of my people, I will never, _ever_, leave you alone. They want a political representative? Well, they are about to get a living nightmare. I will blow the entire Earth Court up if I have to, but they will let me come back. And I will come to you first, before all the rest, you know that. I will always come back.”

The thing about Taehyung promising things was that one had to believe them. With honest, glittery eyes, wide smiles and a pure, beautiful heart, Taehyung made you trust when you thought all that was left of life was to die, alone and misunderstood. He was good, so good he could love a Curse, could make the Cursed feel like it belonged. And for that special infinity, Jimin was ready to cross waters he would drown in.

“Take me with you. Please, please take me with you! Nobody here will care if you take me, you are a Prince and I am nothing, they would let me go in an instant.”, he begged, pleaded like he never thought he would. It didn’t cross his mind until now, not in his wildest nightmares, that an Earth King or whatever the name of the demon was, would take Taehyung away from him.

“I am not taking you to that hell! There is war and crime and poverty in the Earth Kingdom, there are monsters to hurt everything precious and I am not, under no circumstances, going to let you suffer there!”, he was determined, but all Jimin heard was that Taehyung didn’t _want_ them together.

He went quiet and distant, imploded in doubt and pain, but his soulmate wouldn’t even let him have that.

“You are not listening to me love. I promised I will be back. Do you not know I keep my promises?”, Taehyung asked, forehead pressed alongside Jimin’s and tears cascading down his cheeks like water that won’t harm Jimin, finally.

“Tae…”, he tried, choked up and done, so done with this endless loss he lived and loved and fought against.

  
“I will be back. I promise. You stay and be safe and I promise I will come back and be with you.”

The words drowned in kisses then, for Jimin couldn’t stop the yearning monster bursting out of his chest and towards Taehyung, devoted and cursed, so impossibly, powerfully in love he thought it would burn him alive before it drowned him. Either way, death seemed the only path to take.

So he lied, nodded his head and kissed Tae’s tears away, like a good, devoted soulmate that could follow up on promises inevitably cursed and broken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Jimin: Water Folk/the Heir to the Crown/Water Control/ Jansu the otter as the companion_


	2. How it was and will never be again - The winds keep calling (for I travel by no road)

_**1.2. Taehyung / The winds keep calling (for I travel by no road)** _

The Wind Folk kept no space forever occupied, and, at the same time, no home abandoned. It was a contrast of life as calm and harsh as the skies could be and Taehyung thought for a very long time that was _all_ it will be.

He was a Prince, but not the important one, so life was freedom unmarred by expectations. His mother was always a free spirit, a teacher and student alike of their ways and Taehyung drank the lessons in early and with no hesitation.

The Wind Folk lived however they wanted, together and alone, sometimes exclusively one over the other. All except royalty.

Life in the Flying Mountains of the West was only possible as calm and unbothered as it was as long as the royals worked tirelessly at maintaining it so. Father was a champion of proper, distanced governance, concerned about other kingdoms and tribes, free cities and rebels, forever afraid for his people.

His mother left the King when Taehyung was four, just young enough to remember. She was not be stopped and ordered around, and the royals were born into a life where they had to learn that lesson first. Mother didn’t want to raise children like royals, so she chose not to raise them at all. Father was, in a twisted destiny of their lives, all that the four royal children disliked, and yet all that they had.

Sunghyun was lost next, the First Born Prince from stories that belonged to duty and honor and all the stupidities that made you live with purpose and unhappy. He was the perfect child, but he didn’t know how to be a brother, not even when they played together, so Taehyung accepted losing him to father as soon as he had to.

Jihyon was much more difficult. She was the sister Taehyung clung to when storms rolled in and their Flying Mountains seemed to shake the rains out of the skies. Jihyon taught him how to tie ropes to first ledges and hanging bridges he jumped off of, she held him when he learned to fly and later, when he inevitably learned to fall and not die. Calm, sweet, perfect daughter of the Wind, she dreamed of a breeze that would take her far away from a father that spent a better part of her life searching for a suitable husband.

When she was fourteen, he managed to find him, a brat prince of the South Fire Kingdom. A self-entitled fool that he was, he showed no understanding of the world around him that he couldn’t burn. Jihyon hated him, but she loved her people, so she respected Father’s wishes and promised to marry a demon that pouted that he couldn’t burn anything in a kingdom flying cloaked in permanent fog over the Great Ocean.

Taehyung was too young to realize he shouldn’t try to push him off and into the water, let him fizzle out like a firecracker in the warm shallows of their home. But Jihyon was old enough and smart enough, so she saved her future husband and had to scold her brother in front of the entire court.

It wasn’t enough.

Jeongon followed him for days until her got his revenge, flinging Taehyung from a connecting bridge over one of the lower mountains. He expected fear, or so it seemed. He definitely didn’t expect Tiny to jump out of the water and across his very head, flying over mountains in all her huge, deadly glory to protect her Prince. Taehyng laughed and laughed, still too young to understand a royal of a visiting kingdom should have never had a chance to come so close to harming one of the Wind royals.

When Taehyung turned fourteen himself, Jihyon left to get married, all elegance and peace and a lost, abandoned hope of happy winds. It tore Taehyung’s heart out, ripped it into pieces, but there was nothing the silent, forgotten Prince could do but shout in vain, to the winds and to the water, to Jimin and Tiny and sometimes, when he was allowed to visit, to his mother. That is when he learned a free parent does not mean a caring one, for mother blamed Jihyon for being weak and obeying.

She took Minhyuk, Taehyung’s youngest brother with her on a whim that same year, claiming she had to give up so much because she birthed the royal children, surely she could save at least the ones that could be saved. Among a complacent Sunghyun and an absent Jihyon, Taehyung wondered bitterly _when_ was it exactly that anyone offered salvation to _him_.

He had Tiny though, a monster so beautiful nobody dared cross his path, for the Irrelevant Prince had a familiar so legendary weird and so magnificently destructive nobody knew quite where to go with her. Thus, Tiny was not trained or domesticated like other familiars were. Try doing anything with an orca that an orca doesn’t want you to do and well… Tiny didn’t have a family, which was unusual for an orca, and Taehyung had a suffocating one which was uncommon for Wind Folk. All in all, they got along like legendary rebels of old tales, and Taehyung sometimes thought that is exactly what he would become.

Then there was Jimin.

Taehyung wasn’t taken on foreign visits often, if at all, but his first time in the Water Kingdom he jumped into the water after a drowning child, a boy his age, and when Jimin opened his eyes and looked at him like he is the first kind touch he ever felt, he knew he couldn’t let him go.

Maybe it was about having someone to be with and belong to, but in a childish way they could only manage at eight years old. Or maybe it really was destiny and he found a soulmate in an outcast of another tragedy, Taehyung didn’t care much.

Jimin was scarred, wounded, sad and yet so good and beautiful it made him forget how to control air into his lungs. He couldn’t control water, so Father found Taehyung’s interest to be in vain, but he didn’t care for royals or kingdoms. Jimin was a part of him, and he loved him, honestly, devotedly so, even if he wondered sometimes was it enough.

Jimin didn’t seem to hear the love or adoration, so maybe Taehyung was truly damaged in that part of his soul that was supposed to give love like it is destined to be given.

Still, he had no other way or tool but to cling on, water and air be damned, hold and swear to never let go.

When the Earth King called upon a child royal to be sent in order to represent a kingdom that didn’t need such favors, Father interpreted the invitation as a threat that it was and planned to lose a weight he could still afford to.

Taehyung the Rebel didn’t oppose this decision much. It wasn’t because he liked the thought of leaving the only home he ever knew he wanted, or because he was scared of the consequences if he did rebel. It was, contrary to what he said to Jimin, because he knew he couldn’t change it, no matter what he did. The Earth Kingdom called the decisions of the entire world their own, and if he was to be a pawn, it was to be so.

Burdens of all of them are to be carried, Father said, and not for the first time in his life, Taehyung understood him. He hated himself for it.

However, having to go and actually going quietly, with no havoc induced every step of his way, those were two very different paths, and Taehyung planned to take the crazy one. It was the only thing he assumed would work in getting him sent back home, a crazy, unstable weirdo that nobody wanted to deal with.

That was fine. Even excellent.

Jimin wanted to deal with him, and they needed each other, so Taehyung promised to find a way to come back and meant it. No stopping a stubborn, determined Wind Lord that had an orca with an attitude and a tear-stained lips of a sweetheart to run back to.

And yet.

Maybe it was the silent wind within him (but by no means a small one) that whispered of possibilities ahead. Countries not explored, forests on land, deserts and snow and ice, fire and volcanoes and all the other thrills of the world, an adventure calling forward, always forward. He could be free and his and nobody could stop him, if he only wished so, and that was a comfort as much as it was a terror.

Sometimes, he was reminded that he could understand Mother too, and hated himself for that too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Taehyung: Wind Folk/Third son of the Air Commander and King/Air Control/Tiny the orca as a companion_


	3. How it was and will never be again - Have to find the hands to hold (or I will lose my own)

** _1.3. Namjoon / Have to find the hands to hold (or I will lose my own) _ **

Ylorion used to be a majestic city, a hub of lost and found out alike, Lords and Ladies, magic and jewels.

That was before. The once shining towers and sun clocks turned to grey, irrelevant rubble, and color only bothered with eyes that would pay to see it. The great palace of the Lord of Ylorion didn’t charm a stray traveler to settle down in the last Free City of the East anymore, and well… it was for the better.

Normal folk is how Namjoon’s father, the great Lord Mino described people with no magic in them, or rather just no magic that could be observed by someone else. And the _Abnormal_ folk, magic and shiny and so, so necessary for any spell to take home in walls and make a house a home, they were not to live here. It used to be a place where anyone could charm anything, as long as it turned frowns into smiles, or so the books said. They were forbidden, hidden books, forgotten to the world but brought back to life by Namjoon’s nimble fingers searching, combing for answers.

Namjoon’s grandfather changed the lives of them all, born now into different realities. Suho was a child of royalty of a Free City, a relevant and coveted life. But he was also one child too many in a family that was too great and too magical for anything ordinary to thrive. So Suho dropped. And whatever demon found his abandoned mind, neglected from all and foremost common sense, that one held him too close to ever let go.

When he came of age and was to take on a task of the Lords, Suho took the City Guard, for no magical Lord would brace weapons when they could paint colors on naked slave girls and youths of the court. In decadence as thick as honey, the Lords and Ladies of Suho’s time drowned in sugar, one by one, picked out like leeches off of skin.

Suho was 40 years old when his skin finally breathed free, and he cooked the City in hatred and fire so slowly heated that nobody but the imprisoned Abnormals could recall when and how they split from the Normals. Suho was the only Lord, the ultimate winner, a cunning fox nobody should have ever overlooked and allowed to fester in darkness. But they all did, the seduced folk of a long time ago, and that is why he could take their colors away.

Suho liked grey, and the shadow suited him like nobody else before.

He changed the times, and then it was just the matter of maintaining them. There came a perfectly bred child, a product of a union of a faceless mother that wasn’t allowed to live on and Suho the Menace. Mino was so obedient and utterly devoted to father that it went unsaid he will take any form of torture necessary to form him into what he needed to be. True to his own promises, Suho didn’t neglect his only child, but rather worked on him until his dying breath.

And so the monster was born.

Mino had no dreams or wishes or demands. There were the **Laws**, Father’s wishes, and they were to be respected or perish. So many perished. For uttering a wrong word or a right one, but too slowly or quietly, for walking away or staying or simply breathing on a day when the quota of pain wasn’t reached. Mino had no plans or goals in his empty, vastly abandoned life. As the Free City of Ylorion, he was also made grey and faceless by his father.

Namjoon was born because he had to be born, and he also never knew his mother, for he was not born for her. But there, in his very existence, lay the only point off Mino’s life Suho couldn’t program from the grave. He was a son, a _being_, and Mino couldn’t love him any more than he could love himself. Thus, Mino had no vision for him, no form into which Namjoon needed to be transformed into. The rules were there, of course, eternal, short-sighted demands of a neglected child, transferred onto a suffocated one.

Number one: _**Be like father.**_

But Namjoon couldn’t, for Mino wasn’t, not anything, just Suho’s shadow. So he had to read about Grandfather, ultimately, for Mino in his chiseled insanity didn’t even know the God who made him.

Number two: **_Obey the Law._**

And obey the Law he did, but Namjoon was born with a mind too sharp to not see through the grey straight into misery. The Law meant nothing to him. Most things meant nothing to him.

And yet. There was light and love and seductive, eternal shadows of promised color around him, ever since he bothered to look and see and feel, the choked up spirit of the Great Ylorion extending its mighty dragon head from the ashes to claim him.

Namjoon had a nanny that sang to him, old, magical lullabies, promises of a word he wanted to embrace. She loved him, probably, or at least he learned to love her first, a child’s sanctuary before the grey embraced him. Tutors taught him to read, but she showed him the Library, a forgotten adventure in the East Tower, full of magic on paper and the smell of meaningful, passionate lives of all Folk, magical or not, trapped and intertwined on the pages. Nanny Isolda was old, too old to climb up to the tower herself, and she couldn’t even read without glasses, but Namjoon followed her promise of new adventures faithfully and devotedly up and away into the heights of the tower.

He was in the tower and reading, eleven years old, when Mino came for Isolda and took her away. Namjoon cried in silence after, because out loud was unimaginable. Nobody ever explained why she lay dead on the bottom of the stairs below the palace, but nobody ever had to. Namjoon was too smart to not see the obvious sometimes, no matter how badly he wished it was not true.

He had a tutor of ancient fencing that taught him of control, inner and outer things, with limited success. Namjoon was a walking disaster of coordination and nothing ever stayed whole if he approached it with intention of keeping it so. But, as his tutor soon discovered and exploited, that was not the case with living things. Them, he protected the way he wanted himself to be protected perhaps, and it worked like, well… magic.

Little pots and trees and green things, everywhere, popping up left and right around Namjoon’s chambers, them he loved more than anything after Isolda. It was because they were so fragile, so close to death and destruction and yet so beautiful, mesmerizing in complexity and simplicity alike. He loved them and, as an important lesson, learned he didn’t need them to love him back. Mino ignored the plants, or perhaps he never noticed they were there, for he was certainly not raised to notice such things.

The bestiary in the castle held too many monsters to count, suffering, deprived, lost souls, and it was a bear cub of a tamed, broken mother that landed in Namjoon’s hands as a familiar. No ordinary animal, this bear was of a magical, transformed kind, sharply intelligent and dusted in purple fur, a fact of life so forbidden he was never allowed to be shown outside of the castle. The bear _was_ color, and the future Lord of Ylorion was to _rule_ over this last speck on the spectrum, to prove a point. Visceral, honest connection between the two of them hung upon a flimsy, pretend thread of a slave animal and its great and terrible master.

Dusty was a mess of temper and traumatic memories from before he belonged with his human, so it took some time for the two of them, as absent from their own emotions as they were, to connect. But all the Lords had familiars, and Namjoon’s was the first promising, threatening one in decades. Suho had an eagle whose wings were clipped for the sake of control and Mino had a snake, venom long drained. They were tame, lifeless presences of castle life.

But Dusty was tame only in lazy pretense and intent, for the animal that graced Namjoon’s chambers very often demanded attention, petting and space to be, with no restrictions. Namjoon took him to the palace gardens, empty and lifeless as the rest of the city. Dusty loved empty, wide spaces, where he could run and wild around, ever bound by obedience to his human and yet released in a way Namjoon could never be.

He was supposed to have a scent for other bears, but he never even learned the one of his mother, so they were both abandoned and appropriately orphaned in a life of plenty. Mino didn’t like Dusty, and Dusty was smart enough to ignore the humiliation that kept him alive, similar to the strategy of his human.

Which brings us to number three of the rules, the most important one to watch out for: **_Never fail to extinguish magic you don’t have already enslaved._**

Namjoon has been seeing things since he was a baby. Not ghosts or people or even sparks of magic. Just, things that would happen, unavoidably so, in matter of minutes. He would see them in front of his eyes like they would happen in front of him, even if they weren’t and could never be.

Sometimes, these were nice, pleasant things, a child laughing or a couple falling in love. And other times, it was the fabric of the same life he was horrifically living, usually his father dealing justice down on someone out of a sudden.

He learned to use it, in time. It took a few years for him to realize not everyone could do something like that, that it was unnatural and unwanted, and he would be exiled or killed if Mino breathed doubtfully in his direction. He never told anyone, even when it could help and when he had to watch, disgusted by himself, how people lost their minds or lives right in front of him. He hated himself for it, naturally, but it was not a natural thing anyway. In all the books and the oldest reports of magic users, there was never anything on Seers. And that was with good reason. It became very apparent to Namjoon how many manipulative capabilities such a power held.

If he ever became a Lord, if he ever took power, he would be unstoppable to deliver any given goal, as long as he was one step ahead of everyone.

But Namjoon didn’t want a title he was raised to carry. This was not a truth he had to realize after a lot of soul searching, or a lesson learned by efforts wasted. He knew it always, even before he could realize what is he being raised to do. Sometimes, he could comfort himself thinking that he would never have to take the title at all, for Mino still lived for it, breathed for it, and Namjoon didn’t dream of trying to take it. Even if it would maybe help people if he tried, the truth was that he was half terrified and the other half certain he would mess it up anyway, turn into a worse version of both Mino and Suho, lost on a cocktail of power and whatever spite kept them going.

  
It was a destiny he was born to fulfill and yet he wanted nothing more than to run away from it as far as he could, where nobody could find him.

It was the third rule that Namjoon broke, daily, and nobody would ever have known, not until Mino was dead, provided Namjoon himself lived that long, if it wasn’t for Yoongi.

The Lords rarely mixed with the common folk of the Free City, and even when they did, they were guarded from starving, suffering mouths of the poor with a thousand guards. But Namjoon was a curious kid, the sheltered horror of the castle and the deceiving peace of the Library not enough to teach him all he wanted to know.

He dressed like one of the guards, or their kids when he was younger, for the sake of a short pretense and security. The future Lord of the Free City lived as a name with no face to him outside of the palace.

It was on a regular visit to the lower city when he was thirteen that he saw a boy his age, small and scrawny little thing in grey rags and cuts and bruises all over his body. He snuck up next to one of the guards to steal a bag of coins. It was a Sight of the other kind that allowed Najmoon to see him, of course, for the boy was too practiced to be actively seen, and Namjoon turned his head around like he didn’t just see imminent future.

Maybe it was that turn of head, or possibly a tiny change of the universe around him, but future twisted until the boy came up to him and not the guard to lift the money. And Namjoon had a lot more of it, was tempting with a smaller frame and less experience in city life. He was the obvious target.

He probably would have allowed it to happen anyway, if only the bag didn’t lift out of his pocket a second too soon for the hand to actually reach him. Someone else who wasn’t hardwired with careful consideration of what happens next would have probably not noticed. But Namjoon did, and when he turned a surprised face upon the boy, he knew from the trapped, anguished look in the black eyes staring at him that the boy knew he just got caught using powers.

Later, Namjoon would rewind the memory over and over in his mind, admiring the determined stance Yoongi took in a second, hardened and deadly instantly. It was despairing to see something like that blossom across the face of a child. He was smitten and protective in a second of his own, obviously. Yoongi was a hurricane coming for all lives, but visible only to someone who actually wanted to give up on their own.

He grasped Yoongi’s hand before the fingers could move anywhere and cause infinite chaos. A guard noticed, of course, and Yoongi jumped away in terror of being grabbed, but Namjoon saw ahead of all the moves he was about to do and played along. He growled at the guard to let the boy go and grabbed him by the rags himself, acting and sending signals at the same time, probably horribly so. Yoongi told him later he was the worst at pretending he could multitask at anything, but in that moment, it worked.

The guards waited until the just revealed Lord moved, terrified at the streak of crazy he just displayed, and that was enough for Namjoon to claim the boy as a slave servant as a punishment for touching him, the lowlife that he was.

Namjoon never liked that part of how they met, not to explain or to remember, but Yoongi never failed to remind him that life passed by while he was busy reading anyway, so it is always better to act first.

Now, after too many years of fake servitude, truest friendship and a few nights they dared to be _more_, Namjoon was about to act out the stupidest move of his entire life. And, as usual, Yoongi was there to follow him and lead when he couldn’t.

The Earth King called for representatives of each land and each city, and word reached Ylorion too. Mino laughed in the face of the messenger before imprisoning him, not commenting further on the obvious refusal to lose any people on this.

But, there where ways out of the castle and the city and over the desert of the Fire Folk. Especially if you could move things with your mind and saw ahead enough to know what actually required moving.

For the first time ever, there was an open invitation to go somewhere else, without getting rejected, and Namjoon felt more than thought that it is the right move. He didn’t use heart much over his head, but this time, it was a thing of urgency and a feeling of something much bigger than him that pushed him out the door he suspected was open for years.

Mino would send people after him, of course. But, and this was perhaps the worst part, an absent Namjoon saved him the trouble of deciding if he would give the Lordship over to a son he found unworthy, or kill his own child.

“You always imagine crossroads where there are only straight, plain roads leading somewhere unfamiliar.”, Yoongi told him, and finally, Namjoon listened to someone else’s head instead of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Namjoon: Free City of Ylorion/Heir to the Lord title/Short-term seer/Dusty the bear as a companion_


	4. How it was and will never be again - This home in shadows (if only I could bring them closer)

** _1.4. Yoongi / This home in shadows (if only I could bring them closer) _ **

He wasn’t always alone. Too long ago for a dangerous memory of a street kid, Yoongi had a brother and a mother. They lived on the streets in the slums, like almost all the people they knew, struggled and survived on what seemed to be spite alone.

His brother was taken first, to be an expendable body for a minor conflict the Great Asshole Lord needed settled. Yoongi never saw him again, and he never faked promises to anybody that he would find him or anything of that sort. Missing people were dead people, even when they were family, for nobody ever came back to the slums once they were taken.

His mother was a resilient woman, but a child lost was one challenge too many, and she went with a sickness of body and soul. Since then, Yoongi was alone.

There were gangs in the slums, and almost anywhere else in Ylorion too, but Yoongi soon discovered he didn’t play nice with people. Connections came difficult and he usually never wanted to make them, for himself and for others. Everyone was a liability that could hurt you by loss or betrayal. That was the case especially for the Abnormal Folk, the misfortunes with powers.

And Yoongi never shared with anyone the damnation that he _was_ one. Or, at least, he never shared it with a person that stayed alive and with him.

He could move things when he wanted, a twitch of fingers and they floated where he needed them to be. It was a simple thing, as easy as breathing for him. Of course, he was taught early on by a panicking and strict mother that nobody else could do that and it was a bad, horrible thing to show to anyone, so he didn’t do it very often, at least while she was alive. After, he practiced when alone, moving further and bigger things, faster and as subtle as he could.

It was a necessity of a hungry stomach that made him hone the skill into a thieving arsenal of tricks. Alone, it was easier to hide and Yoongi preferred the shadows of the slums to disappear anyway. Even the people who knew him soon forgot they did, for he never stuck to a place long enough to develop habits.

There were other children on the streets of course, all of them orphans and only some of them sane enough to know how to survive on their own. Sometimes they formed little groups of thieves, gravitating toward each other in hunger and necessity. Yoongi joined one of them for a while when he was twelve. It was not by choice but by necessity, since he fell ill with one of the diseases that would have perhaps manage to kill him if it wasn’t for the boys. Later, he forgot majority of their names, having no contact with any of them for longer than a few minutes it took for someone to drop off food and him to pay up with whatever they wanted in exchange.

Only one of them, a scrawny little thing that looked like closer to death than Yoongi stuck around to help him a few times. His name was Kihyun and he looked at Yoongi like he was a dog, a wounded, hungry one, deserving of mercy and help and a pat on the head when he managed to keep his food down. It would have annoyed Yoongi, but he was feverish and barely aware of what was happening most of the time.

They were friends, probably, for neither betrayed or wounded the other and soon Yoongi was getting better, little by little. Kihyun seemed glad, even if he never smiled and generally didn’t show much emotion beyond nodding in confirmation of whatever Yoongi asked. There were some demons behind his eyes, forever lurking, painting a youthful face a shade older than it should have been. And there were scars, on his arms and legs, long gashes of something Yoongi never asked about. He didn’t dare do so because Kihyun seemed like a huge flight risk, eyes always hopping from danger to danger, assessing where the next blow would come from.

When he was almost completely healthy, Yoongi jumped in front of a guard that was chasing Kihyun away from his hideout. He spent a week in the lower prison cell, punished for coins Kihyun stole and got away with. But that prison was only one of many, and it was so _easy_ to forget you put someone down there, especially if they had a power that allowed them to slip away like a ghost you can barely recall trapping.

Magic was not rare in the slums, as it was the case everywhere else in Ylorion. It was cocooned in a layer of pretended secrecy that would never fool anyone but the Asshole in Power.

And yet.

Whispers and secrets and dead people that could do magnificent, wonderful things went away and never came back, more often than not. Lord Suho fucked them all up magnificently in that way, hell-bent on persecutions nobody could recall they deserved at all.

In the Great Castle lived a minority of protected jewels of the future, distant and trapped, but kept safe from the dangers of anyone with magic. And below, in the dirt of the Lower City, the most infectious bug was always hate towards the privileged few and _so on and on and on._ Of course, Yoongi was not above hating them too, naturally, for he was an orphan who had nothing but a heart full of desires he hid from himself, miserably cold and dangerously exposed, day and night, all because of _them_.

The stark difference was something he was born into, and perhaps the feeling of how unjust it all was would fade into habit in a decade or two, but for now, the greatest enemy Suho’s teachings had was the memory of the Lesser Folk that they were in no shape or form deserving of that was served upon them.

There were bright, hopeful things in the slums too, flashes of laughter and love and good people, or perhaps only average things that adopted the glow of relevance from the grey around them. Yoongi knew people who found someone to love among the ruins, and admired them greatly (and secretly) for doing so. He saw parents teaching their children useless and fun games, just for the sake of laughter, innocent and loud in the absence of happy. It was a bittersweet lesson in what the world truly was, each time, bit by bit.

A little girl, not much younger than Yoongi was when his mother died, exposed to the slums that she could make flowers grow, anywhere in the stones. She made so many of them come to life, too little to remind them all of how beauty looked like, but too much to slip away when they came for her. She was left on the Great Bridge to the palace, alone, trapped and shivering, night after night, as a punishment and as a warning. And yet, she kept making the damn flowers, like her life depended on them. Maybe it did, in the end. Nobody could reach her, because she was guarded and also because it would take years to raise a hero willing to try. They watched though, as if looking away would somehow be worse.

She lasted five days before she jumped off into the dirty water of Ixilion, the Dead River. Starvation would have killed her regardless, but it seemed especially significant to remember she cut the string holding her trapped a bit before it could. There was a place down the river where the people who scavenged the trash coming on the river bank swore they saw a little patch of mud blossoming in flowers, but that was not a fairytale Yoongi was likely to trust.

Another curse that set him apart from the majority of the slum was his best friend. Grey was a raven and the most annoying familiar in existence. Yoongi loved her with his entire being, as she did him, obviously. Animal companions were not a luxury orphans usually had, and she was the prettiest black thing in the entire city, so Yoongi hid her too.

As much as you could hide a smart bird that came and went as she pleased and showed up only to steal some food and peck Yoongi on the head before he fell asleep. She kept guard over him most nights, invisible and silent in the shadows, so perfectly black she almost blended in with Ylorion. Probably because she was very proud of her black feathers and certainly because she was too smart to not get annoyed at Yoongi’s nerve, she hated the name he gave her.

The Lesser Folk were never allowed to leave Ylorion. Yoongi had been planning to escape for years, when he was given the reason to stay nevertheless.

Namjoon was a disaster in the making, a Lord heir of the entire city, wealth and privilege wrapped in a teenager’s body. And, sadly, dressed like a common guard on the day when Yoongi tried robbing him.

It was the first time he got caught, ever, and the horror of what was happening barely seeped through his mind to his consciousness. It was abnormal that a human with no abilities caught him, almost impossible. More importantly, it was even less likely for that human to pretend he _didn’t_ just catch him stealing and demand a punishment of his servitude for _touching him_.

He was trapped and with no chance of escape when they escorted him to the Palace. Namjoon walked beside him, tall and confident and only throwing glances when it was invisible to anyone else. Yoongi felt exposed, terrified of the sick game he would be forced to play for the entertainment of this royal prick as soon as they passed the gates.

And yet. Something stopped him from moving everything in sight trying to escape.

It was a blur of unimaginable luxuries that slipped past Yoongi’s mind when he was being taken through the palace to Namjoon’s chambers. In the years of his life spent in the palace after that, he found corners that were just shadowy and humble enough to feel familiar and calming, but the first time he saw anything inside, it amplified his fear and he almost used his powers. Namjoon grabbed his twitching arm and dragged him along a corridor towards the kitchens.

There was something he was being told, but he could barely listen, and for good reason. A portrait of Lord Suho was hanging above the entrance, menacing and heartless as he always seemed when shown to the Lower City on days they had to pretend were holidays. Paralyzed, Yoongi allowed himself to be dragged and thrown inside the kitchens. Nameless servants handed him something to clean himself with in an actual, separate washing room, all by himself, and then he was handed a portion of food that would normally feed him for a week. He didn’t remember what it was or how it tasted, just that he was surprised nobody was shouting at him or trying to take it.

Then, he was taken to the head guard, who slapped him three times to get his point across: he was a slave of the Lord Mino now, assigned to serve his son Namjoon and that would be a point at which Yoongi lost consciousness.

The transition to life in the palace wasn’t slow. He learned quickly and acted even quicker, so nobody had a reason to complain or hit him beyond the usual amount.

It was only a month later that he was allowed to actually meet his master and start serving him. He could have ran way, of course, but leaving the palace, even if he managed it, would mean leaving Ylorion all together, and Yoongi didn’t think he was ready yet. So, in a show of stubborn curiosity, he stayed long enough to see Namjoon and then another month to get assigned to his chambers as a personal servant and so on and on until they were finally alone in one place and the Lord heir shed his fake skin and revealed who he really was.

Yoongi almost smacked him for being so stupid and so trusting, once he realized he is not being lied to about the future Lord of Ylorion not only knowing he has powers, but claiming he has his _own_ to match. Namjoon was a storm of a different type, a brand of dangerous idiot that gambled both of their lives because he was lonely, and if that wasn’t the stupidest thing Yoongi ever heard. But the only true miracle that happened in that room on that day was not the future Lord predicting future (correctly) in front of him, or the fucking purple bear that grumbled from the corner like it belongs there and Yoongi doesn’t.

It was just the simple fact that Yoongi trusted him.

Blind faith in Namjoon’s loyalty proved to be the correct thing to do (which was even more of a miracle, for Yoongi expected a stab in the back the way he expected cold water to be refreshing), and it was a surprise after a surprise from then on. Some of these miracles manifested in the next years in random stretches of disbelief and magic.

Grey showed up to bitch at them both soon, terrified that she lost her human and angry at Namjoon for taking him away (Dusty had a fucking opinion on that, if only communicated with a warning growl).

The future Lord of Ylorion led a truly sad life and was a damaged soul trapped among the palace walls, hating his father and grandfather and dreaming of a life in which he wasn’t there at all. Yoongi felt for the despair in his eyes, perhaps finally understanding someone else completely, even if they came upon that conclusion from opposite sides.

Namjoon didn’t want to be a Lord, terrified of himself too much to trust in any future, which made him more like the Lesser Folk than he could possibly imagine.

He took him to the Library, a sacred place of words and scribbles that Yoongi knew nothing about. So, naturally, Namjoon taught him how to read and write. This was a feat in itself, for Yoongi didn’t like listening to people. But Namjoon had this _thing_ about him when he got excited about something, an aura of solemn happiness that invited you to come enjoy without intruding, and he won the battle with Yoongi’s stubbornness before it even started.

Somehow, Namjoon kept protecting him from discovery, death, hunger, loneliness and all the other demons he could reach. He didn’t ask for protection in return, but Yoongi found he would rather throw knives at himself than harm Namjoon in any way.

Idiotically, he went and fell in love with the son of the man that wanted to kill him, most certainly.

They were up in the Library on a rainy day, having attended the celebrations of Namjoon’s 17th birthday (Mino gifted his son a dagger that belonged to Suho) and Yoongi kissed him. Stupidly, Namjoon kissed back and then they were still them, but different, unspoken but committed.

Where this was supposed to go, Yoongi didn’t know and, for once, it seemed Namjoon didn’t either. They didn’t speak about it, just reached for each other sometimes, always in secret and shadows and hid all the breaths worth taking in each other’s lungs. Namjoon would look at him, sometimes, like he was the most important person in the room full of royalty and Yoongi allowed himself a smidge of happiness before cursing him out for being so obvious.

When the Earth King called upon the Lord of Ylorion and Mino laughed like a maniac he was, Yoongi knew something was about to change.

Namjoon was planning to leave and there was no question that Yoongi would join him. Leaving Ylorion was the only dream he had for years and the feeling of relief when they slipped away, surprisingly easy for two magic users and a purple bear with an attitude, was something Yoongi had imprinted in his mind forever.

As was the sound of Grey’s wings clapping above him and the warmth of Namjoon’s hand in his, walking away like they would never come back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Yoongi: Free City of Ylorion/Orphan from the Lower City/Telekinesis/ Grey the raven as a companion_


	5. How it was and will never be again - Oh how magnificent the fire (and yet it warms me not)

_**1.5. Hoseok / Oh how magnificent the fire (and yet it warms me not)** _

The Great Fire Kingdom was a paradise made solid by distance and governance. Detached and secretive, the people didn’t mix with anyone from the outside. It wasn’t any sense of entitlement that allowed them so, but simply fear from what resided elsewhere.

Beyond the heavily disputed borders drawn on maps and rocky ridges of the Great Desert, a long way to the south was the Savage Fire Kingdom. They called themselves the Fire Lords and they began wars decades ago that were finished now, in blood and too many lives lost. The Wind Lords and the Earth Kingdom called the savages South Fire Kingdom and Hoseok’s people the East Fire Kingdom. The border in the desert was made permanent by detachment of people that never visited any of the lands east of the Free City of Ylorion. In the capital of the Great Fire Kingdom, a fortress called simply the Shelter, Hoseok was raised to believe it is only a matter of time when the troops from the South Fire Kingdom would march across the desert and into their home. They always needed to be prepared, careful and distant, not mixing with anyone that could betray them. Hoseok was a child of the King’s sister, so it was expected of him to know all about the threats and wars they had to be ready for.

The dangerous Fire Lords from the south were the biggest threat, but then there were also all the others, waiting, preying on their paradise. The Wind Folk, who stayed away from all in their flying mountains, but have married their princess to the future Fire Lord of the South. The people of the Waterlands, with terrible skill and secretive intentions, always waiting on their shores. The Earth Kingdom, the benevolent leaders of their world, careful friends of Hoseok’s family, and yet… Nobody could ever be trusted. Their closest allies in the times of the great wars were the Lords of the Free City, but Ylorion went insane with its ruler. They hated all the magically gifted there now. In contrast, there was very little worth to a life in the Great Fire Kingdom, especially in the Shelter, if you couldn’t control fire. 

Even though he studied all of them and knew the matter good enough to list the enemies in his sleep, Hoseok didn’t believe they were about to be attacked in the Fire Kingdom. Beyond the desert, in the Free City, out on the Outer Islands or the Flying Mountains, there were just people living and dying, as simple as that. But the great royals kept their fears in front of their shields like an added bonus of mindless panic and separation was the only way to keep mass hysteria at bay. Hoseok’s mother and father were both fighters and held high positions in the royal army. The family was adored like deities rather than simple children lucky enough to be born with a crown waiting for them. And it was truly possible, even for Hoseok as a cousin of future rulers, to inherit the throne, if enough of the royal children in front died for their freedom. That was a horrific thought that crossed Hoseok’s mind only when spoken to by tutors or his parents and his unwillingness to accept there might be a war or any dying at all built a wall between them. The problem, and inevitably the reason the King, cousins and his own parents didn’t know how to treat him, was that Hoseok saw the world as a bright, perfect place, filled with happy people or ones that needed simple things to become happy and no threat of war or death or darkness could convince him otherwise. He wasn’t stupid, contrary to what the majority of the other royal children thought, but he didn’t see the point in being worried instead of hopeful.

And then there was that issue with his powers too.

Because of Hoseok, for the first time in recorded history a member of the royal family didn’t control fire. That wasn’t because he couldn’t, but because his ability manifested in a completely different way. Ever since he was a child, flames didn’t interest him at all, and while he did manage to make a few of them move or appear somewhere they shouldn’t, it was a rare and weak occurence. Such a thing was not uncommon among the big royal family, even if they were too ashamed to speak of it openly. Some royals simply required an additional servant that could do the thing for them, if it ever became necessary. His parents and the King himself found it a pity, but a tolerable thing. and it was to be left at that for the rest of his life.

But then the travelling circus came to the Fire Court.

Hoseok was seven and so excited to see the shiny pretty performers leap across the main square in front of the Shelter that he dragged both his nanny and guard to stand there two hours early. It was unusually warm and the harsh glow of sunlight reflected on marble blinded him, but he kept looking and waiting for the door of the makeshift tent to open and magic of motion to pour out. The circus came to the Shelter every year and he was only allowed to go that one time, both mother and father convinced too much dancing would interfere with his military training.

Finally, the tent opened and a crowd of dancers and acrobats in colorful costumes ran out, followed by drummers and violinists and it was magnificent. Hoesok jumped up and down in delight and it would have been the best day of his life, if what they brought out after the dancers didn’t distract him. It was a man, dressed in a circus master suit, a menacing smile on his lips as clear as day from Hoseok’s front row seat. In his arms was a small tiger cub, fluffy little ball of orange and black. He was holding it by the neck and the poor thing was meowing in pain. The man stepped closer, around the dancers and lifted the cub up, as if to show it to the royalty sitting in their lounge.

Hoseok heard his cousins laughing and pointing at it, amused by the delicate nature of what would become a beast too dangerous to tame very soon, but he couldn’t look away from the cub. Just for a moment, their eyes met, boy and animal, and there was so much fear in its eyes that Hoseok felt like someone set him on fire in reaction to it. He didn’t remember doing it later when his panicked parents asked, but it was immortalized in the memory of the entire court when a seven year old Hoseok jumped across the fence separating him from the man and ran with his hands extended, decisive and too fast for the guards to catch. And out of his small hands came a power, but not flames. It was light, white-hot and burning everything it touched, like sunlight condensed by sheer willpower.

Terrified, the man dropped the cub and swung his taming whip toward Hoseok. However, it would turn out that Hoseok found not just his power, but also his familiar that day, for the tiny cub landed on its paws and bounced straight to the circus master’s leg, claws out and teeth barred. The whip never reached Hoseok, but the white light coming out of his hands spread, back around his skin and up the arms, until it reached his chest and exploded in sparks of yellowish flame, illuminating the entire square and definitely announcing he had something special up his sleeve.

He had to go undergo weeks of examinations and rigorous training from then on, but nobody ever understood how he controlled sunlight itself instead of fire. And in the Great Fire Kingdom puzzles were left on the outside of all important things. His parents showed interest in him afterwards, of course, but from a distance of someone equally worried and afraid. Hoseok felt abandoned and lonely more often than not, and no effort on his side to fit in or wield flames managed to make anyone forget. Even the King himself avoided looking in his direction, like he was an unknown that he doesn’t want to approach.

Shae grew up into a large, elegant tigress and hardly left his side, as if in worry he would get lost or hurt if she wasn’t around. That was ridiculous, of course, for nobody would ever even look at him in a bad way, provided they looked at him at all. There in that pitfall of human interaction, Hoseok uncovered the wealth of observing. The people in the Shelter were different in so many ways and yet so similar in almost all of them. That is how he concluded nobody except royalty pays any attention to these enemies that wait at every border. They just lived, day by day, respecting the rulers and their rules, including the one about staying away from foreigners, even when they came for a rare visit.

“What would happen if the rules changed and we got to meet the others?”, Hoseok asked himself, and Shae, if she was willing to open her eyes and blink at him in laziness.

He had another friend, an unlikely alliance that he hated at first. It was a common tradition among the people of the Great Fire Kingdom to give names to their children after the names of royalty, and a boy named (appropriately) Hoseok showed up at court when Hoseok (the royal) was twelve and going through a bit of an angry phase. Hoseok (the royal) ignored the boy, even while his parents thought it would be amusing the assign him to royal guard training and future duty at Hoseok’s side. Hoseok (the not-royal) was adorably sweet and ultimately (after two days of sulking) broke through to Hoseok (the royal). They became as friendly as a royal child could be to a guard training to die for him in case of emergency one day, and Hoseok (the not-royal) admitted to having a nickname he liked, after only a few months of letting Hoseok (the royal) get confused every time he called him by his own name. The re-named Wonho told him much later he loved his name anyway, because he shared it with a singular royal child that was not mean to the “commoners”.

Friendship aside, they were expected to behave as a royal and his servant a lot and it caused plenty of embarrassment for Hoseok and amusement for Wonho, who never failed to laugh at the royal that neither behaved nor cared for being one. However, Wonho was sent to the court for a familiar reason – a poor family that needed all the help it could get, even from its children, and the training to be a guard went along nicely, except for one thing. It was expected that a royal guard would know how to control fire, necessary even for the sake of their duty, but Wonho had no magic in him. No matter how much he wished, pleaded with Gods or practiced, no flames rose from his palms. He was despairing over it, suffering disappointed looks and mocking of the other trainees, and finally broke into tears in front of Hoseok, the only one who didn’t really care at all about powers. Being a royal child that everyone would rather avoid than deal with came with an advantage in this case, for Hoseok requested and pleaded with his parents until they accepted the young guard as a permanent fixture. The reason that won in the end was an entirely fake one – Hoseok told them he couldn’t stand to have someone capable of controlling flame around him when he, the royal child, could not – and it worked very quickly. Wonho was so relieved he hugged him, ignoring protocol, which was one of Hoseok’s favorite things to do.

When he turned fifteeen and the time came to choose a training option available for royalty, Hoseok decided to leave the Shelter. As difficult as it was to disappoint his parents, both nodding in acceptance while not making eye contact with him, he realized there would never be a place for him at the court where he didn’t belong. When he got an outpost and a tiny house in a village on their western border, with a task of reminding the locals their rulers didn’t forget about them, Hoseok left with a spring in his step, pretending it didn’t sting he could read parting relief on faces saying goodbye. Shae strutted next to him and Wonho followed behind as a singular escort, both of them relieved to leave, so Hoseok found it a brighter scenario because of them too.

They called his new home the Eastern Village, from years ago when it was part of the Earth Kingdom and served as their border control outpost. War brought it into the Fire Kingdom, but the local people cared for none of those things. Prince or not, Hoseok was from a distant palace or castle or whatever else the royal and the rich called their houses, and it was of no concern to the common people did they throw stones or burned things for a display of power.

The house was really tiny, but it was in a meadow at the entrance to a farmer village, a little wooden thing with no protocols or decadence around. Hoseok was unadjusted to the village life, farming was a foreign concept and insects terrified him (while Wonho found it hilarious and cackled every time Hoseok screamed), but it was the easiest thing to get used to. In the years he lived there, Hoseok found the slow trickling, serene peace within himself and acceptance of the locals into their families and homes. It was a sense of belonging, because of the man he was and regardless of the fact his skin sometimes adopted a yellow, powerful glow when he laughed too much or just felt too happy for his own skin. Shae stopped terrifying the local children and Wonho had a following to girls and boys drooling over his muscles and “sensitive demeanor”, whatever that was, everywhere he went, so Hoseok counted himself lucky there.

He was eighteen when a rider came to his house, carrying a letter from his parents. Among greetings and protocolled politeness was an order. He was to go to the Earth Court for a diplomacy meeting and be sure to not be compromised or hurt in any way while there. Ten guards arrived in a week from that, waiting to escort him like the royal representative he never was.

“Can you say no and just… keep on living here?”, Wonho asked him, hands twisting and knotting in his lap.

“No, I can’t. This is my duty and I have to respect it. But you can. I can leave you here to keep watch over this house until I am back.”, Hosoek said, voice trained to not show how terrified he was of what awaited. It was clear to him that such a mission wouldn’t have been bestowed upon him unless the King, and possibly his parents, weren’t aware that he might not come back. Those enemies of the Fire Kingdom he didn’t believe in suddenly became a very real threat, even just for a second.

But a part of him also wanted to go, for the world held more than he could see in his village, or even at the Shelter, and if he learned how to find a place for himself here, surely he could find it somewhere else too?

Wonho wouldn’t even consider leaving him to go alone of course, loyal to the bone but weeping like his fangirls and fanboys when they were leaving the actual house, so much that Hoseok had to maneuver his horse very close to Wonho’s to fake a conversation and hand him a tissue, a bit teary and giggly himself. Shae walked behind them at a distance at which she could terrify the horses of the other guards from riding too close to her human and his guard.

It was a sunrise of a spring day and Hoseok rode west from the only place he ever called home, hoping for a new one sooner than later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Hoseok/the Great Fire Kingdom (the East Fire Kingdom)/Member of the royal family/(Sun)light control/Shae the tiger as a companion_


	6. How it was and will never be again - For duty, honor and family (after I find a place to belong)

** _1.6. Seokjin/For duty, honor and family (after I find a place to belong) _ **

Rai was supposed to be a city of wealth, beauty and royalty, a jewel of the Earth Kingdom long held secure behind the Endless Mountain. Pushed in a crevice of a mountain range so high it reached into clouds and out of sight, nobody who didn’t belong to the Earth Kingdom or its friends could go inside. Protected behind tall, ancient walls and cold rock of the range, the Earth Court reigned supreme over everything.  
The royals of Earth Kingdom thought so and celebrated their time on top of the world appropriately. And on top of the top of the world, there sat Seokjin, the Crown Prince and only child of King Taeon and Queen Sashin.

Born to be a King, Seokjin was raised to fill crowns twice as big as those of his ancestors. The royal house of the Earth Kingdom has been rising in power, by trade and alliance for almost a century before he was born, and it was expected he would continue the tradition. Rai was to be an Eternal City and Seokjin had to become worthy.

It was a life that he was envied for by many, of that he was certain. No matter the expectations, his parents didn’t raise a spoiled idiot, but exposed him to some harsh realities of life years before he would normally have seen them. There were executions, private and public, families exiled and allies blackmailed, and Seokjin sat right next to King Taeon throughout the displays of power since he was five. His mother spent years choosing tutors and teachers, the best of the best, called upon them from all the lands that would answer to obey and teach the future King. As long as he stayed in the cold, protected caves of the cave system, reserved for the royals and their families, Seokjin could ask or learn anything.

And he didn’t fail. That was not an option, ever. Behavior, military training, poised diplomacy or dismissal of servants, Seokjin passed all the exams and trials with a confidence of a star. Father and Mother were proud of him, always, but usually in different ways. King Taeon liked the future promised and now solidified for his royal line, the task of the ancestors and a burden given to him by his own father now accomplished. Queen Sashin was most proud of the abilities she had someone teach her child, making a schedule and having complete control of his life. It was a life perfect, styled and colored, one it was difficult to complain about.

And yet, Seokjin managed to find flaws. In himself, in his family, in the perfectly executed plans that ran the entire kingdom. From the outside looking in, a perfect life was in fact a role he played and destiny pre-written, where no action uniquely his was allowed, and would thus never make any difference. It was an existential crisis occurring too early in a life, but still swinging full force at him, in that brief moment before he fell asleep and then stronger later, when some dream of missed chances and lives unlived woke him up in the dead of night.

The truth was, at the bottom of it, that Seokjin had no idea who he was, or who he would be if there were no lessons learned to perfection and schedules fulfilled for others. Strip away the crown, the wealth, mother, father and the Court, left standing was a boy confused about wanting things and never learning he was allowed to ask. An average boy, in every sense, but glorified for all achievements like they were heroic, when they simply were a duty and a task finished, a childhood dismissed. Shaping a king took a kingdom, of course, and Seokjin’s only task was to accept living for them, the Court, family, the people.

Rai had seven large palace buildings for the royal family in the caves and the one chosen for Seokjin was a large old one next to the courtyard where the guard procession stood and watched over him. He observed them for hours during meetings and Court duties. Stoic, large and bigger than life they seemed, the chosen hundred, the best of a nation, display of power and wealth and pride, marching up and down the cave cathedral that housed the courtyard. He could never speak to them, for servants were for ordering around and soldiers were there to die for him, and court etiquette proclaimed he must behave like neither exists while they obey. Of course, he tried speaking to a few, meeting shocked glances and dead silence in answer. What interested him the most was what they did with their lives after their duty to him was done for the day. Did they have friends, parties, dinners and lovers, people they loved and others they avoided, how did their rooms and houses outside the caves look like and what games they played for fun. All things tangible but untouchable to him, for the Crown Prince had no friends and no fun. The bittersweet beauty of being the one they would die for was that none of them found him worthy of company long enough to find out who they were dying for.

His parents would never allow such ideas, so Seokjin hid them, smiled and glared and ordered people around, learned names and attributes of foreign royalty and practiced staying perfect. In the battle yard, soldiers taught him how to imagine and fold soil to his wishes, dust and sand and rocks, until all yielded into shapes and projectiles he could swing at enemies.

Secretly, Seokjin liked sneaking away to the royal garden, a vast display of greenery in the First Palace, just beyond the Gate entry to the caves, where they had flowers and a small forest of evergreen trees, brought down from the Endless Mountain. It would keep and live for weeks and then be replaced by new plants as soon as they started dying out, with no sunlight or fresh air for company in the caves. He would sit in the soil that smelled like the fresh wilderness of the mountains (or so he imagined they would, for he was not allowed to step out of Rai under no circumstances) and build little worlds out of earth with his mind, cities on water and Flying Mountains of the West he so wished to see, deserts of the East and the volcanoes in the South. He had a way with his powers that derailed the violent, rock throwing art of waging war from under your feet and put stories in the sand. He read books about heroes and their loved ones in the night, smuggled from the royal library among the heavy toms about military tactics. It seemed to him the adventures of those heroes simply started, almost like the books themselves claimed their actors and they found these magnificent, terrible things happening to them by complete accident. Seokjin craved such an accident to land at his feet, because of him and not for the crown, so he could grow to the challenge and ride away to adventure. The ones he imagined were never about war, but about love and dragons and magic instead, hidden maps with treasures and fairies whose riddles he had to answer. The older he was, it was more and more apparent to him such things never happened, and even if they did, they would never happen to him in his golden cage.

As lonely as he was, usually in rooms filled with people, Seokjin didn’t stop searching for companions to take on those adventures that would never happen. Tragically, he didn’t have an animal companion, even though a lot of Earth Kingdom children found their familiars. The entire royal family centuries back never found companions at all, and Seokjin hoped in vain for years before giving up. Animals in the royal zoo were sometimes company enough, and he was especially fond of a young panda named Bom. It was a lazy creature that loved to ignore him right after being given food and seemed to make no fuss about his presence at all, except when the petting stopped and Bom’s personal slave the Crown Prince stayed away for too many days. Then, the panda would look at him almost crossed, adorably determined to show him some attitude that needed winning over and a few apologies. Bom was no familiar, just an animal which found him amusing and tolerable, but honestly so, and Seokjin adored him for it.

When he was sixteen, King Taeon organized a ceremony of Crown Reception, an official confirmation Seokjin would inherit the Kingdom. It was a lavish event, almost a month long, where people showed up continuously from all over the world to bestow their gifts upon the future King. One of the royal relatives gifted him with an entire procession of servants, fit for a King, or at least so they said. That is how, for the first time in his life, the Crown Prince Seokjin gained a friend and a piece of trouble at the same time.

Jeon Jungkook came to the court as a servant, and served for a full week as a kitchen boy in Seokjin’s personal kitchen, before he managed to wreck the bigger part of the Prince’s chambers by shifting into a giant wolf in the middle of serving dinner. Seokjin screamed louder than he would like to admit, and guards from the bottom of the hallway in front of his chambers almost ran in. But the wolf had a limp, a pained, anguished look in his eyes and didn’t look dangerous at all, despite its size. Contrary to everything he learned about shifters, rare and wild creatures that were almost extinct, Seokjin approached and didn’t get his limbs bitten off long enough to try helping him. They were alone and nobody ran inside when Jin shouted that he is fine, so he let the injured wolf fall asleep in his lap, stroking behind his ears and worried out of his mind.

When Jungkook turned back to human, after a full day of sleeping off the injury, he was terrified and ready to run away. Seokjin looked at the boy for the first time properly and not in dismissal of servants as he usually did. He was a few years younger than him, but a whole universe more tortured, judging by scars at his back and chest and a tremor of distrust that shook his entire body. It took him hours, but Seokjin managed to convince the boy to stay and rest and forget about titles and the rules. This was someone wounded, brave and powerful but hurt beyond physical scars and Seokjin wanted to help and protect, almost drowning in need to shield the boy from whatever demons haunted him.

Jungkook stayed, but he was silent and never explained about the shifting or the scars. How a shifter came to be a servant among royalty, a crime punishable by death almost anywhere in the world, Seokjin never found out. If Jungkook talked, it was to discuss duties, the court gossip or ask about Seokjin’s day. Futile, useless words, but words of trust and safety nevertheless.

Maybe he thought speaking about any of it would wake up demons he managed to put to sleep, of he didn’t want to put Seokjin in danger when the end of their little conversations inevitably came. Whatever it was, Jungkook was real and true and never asked for anything but words, from human to human, no crowns in the room allowed. And Seokjin adored him for it, intoxicated on every little bit of conversation, even the times when the brat in the shifter boy came out to play and he gave Seokjin hell for being only average or completely shit at something. It made all the difference in the world, for finally Seokjin felt like a human around him. A small voice inside of him asked, sometimes, how long would it last and when would Jungkook disappear into thin air, too tortured to hold onto Seokjin’s open hands, polished golden and slippery as they were.

It was four years later, when Seokjin was twenty and King Taeon decided it necessary to call upon the representatives of all kingdoms and Lords , for there was war and death upon them, possibly, and the Earth Kingdom needed to enter it with an upper hand over everybody, that Jungkook finally vanished.

Seokjin attended meetings for days on end, about political allies and the threat from the South Fire Kingdom that they were trying to assess and eliminate by this meeting of representatives. Representatives were to be royals, young adults that could be sacrificed as hostages in the Earth Kingdom cage, for their people and for all the others too. Father said it was a necessary political precaution and nothing would happen to the representatives anyway, beyond the great honor of living in the greatest city in the world, with all the privileges they bestowed upon their own royalty. Seokjin never questioned Father’s orders and this one did make tactical sense, of course. From the other side, the only human that experienced these privileges they spoke about, and for his entire life, Seokjin wished he could warn them, whoever they were, not to answer and never to come be trapped. At least some of them had to be birds that have taken flight before, and just because Seokjin never did, it didn’t mean he didn’t know how torturous it would be to imprison the ones who did.

He came back to his chambers late at night, ready to dismiss Jungkook and get teased about useless Princes sitting in useless meetings. But the room was empty. This would have been a sight that wouldn’t make one instantly panic, not even if it was empty of the only friend you thought you had in the world. Then he looked at the bed and saw clothes, Jungkook’s servant clothes, folded neatly and left instead of a set of nobleman robes Seokjin ordered to be washed that morning and it struck him.

Jungkook was gone.

He stayed awake the entire night, moved stones upon stones to create a window through which he could see outside, out where the royal caves thinned out, and stared out at a distant part of the Royal Road that he could see outside the walls of the Rai. He visited the Wall and the outskirts sometimes, rarely, but the Road, out where he knew Jungkook was, he never stepped a foot on. He didn’t know why or how he escaped, but it mattered not, for some flights were better left unexplained, especially if they could compromise the trapped, flightless birds left behind.

Silently, Seokjin cried and begged the universe to spoil all paths of those other birds coming to join him in his prison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Seokjin: Earth Kingdom/Crown Prince/Earth Control/ No animal companion_


	7. How it was and will never be again - If I could burn away through all these shapes (so you see the me underneath)

** _1.7. Jungkook/If I could burn away through all these shapes (so you see the me underneath) _ **

There were exactly fifty eight islands of Udo, some inhabited and others just volcanic rock perturbing the ocean water. They covered the area of the Great Desert and were populated by eleven noble families and their people, whose residential castles stood carved in freshly solidified magma upon the ashes of ones the eruptions took away. Their stories said the South Fire Lords could not be killed or exiled out of their ancestral homes, not by fire at least. They were unforgiving and unyielding people, knowing no custom of turning to look back on what burned away.

Jungkook was born as a Jeon, the great house of Fire Lords that held a leading position in front of all others since the last Great War. His father, the Supreme Fire Lord Jiho fought and won that war, waged in flames and lava. He was a type of man that made one wonder if the human remained in a battle and a demon came back to rule the Folk. There was no life on any island of Udo that Jiho didn’t approve, no happiness that he didn’t examine and allow, no freedom to breathe anything else but the toxic fumes of his rage. And enraged he was, ever since he was a child. The world didn’t care for the South Fire Folk and their wars until Jiho ruled. He sailed to the mainland, docked at the cliffs of the Great Desert and pillaged and robbed until the world took notice. There was no peace during the rule of Jeon Jiho, just waiting.

When he was a young leader he fathered a child with a daughter of a Fire Lord that later died fighting in a battle Jiho won for them, at whatever cost. Left was a child, the first Prince Jeongon of the South Fire Kingdom, the future ruler of them all. He was a brutish, violent child, the kind that failed to soften the heart of any person. But fire, oh fire he loved more than Jiho did. All the Fire Lords could wield flame, or they were pushed in it to repent the failure of their existence. And Jeongon burned everything in sight with such delight, even as a baby, so nobody had a doubt at all that the great House of Jeon lived on. There was no stopping that hunger for flames, not that Jiho wanted to get in the way of his perfect little war machine.

Jungkook was born ten years later. He was the second child of Lord Jiho that lived to be called by its heritage, and that was for the misfortunate reason that he was born to the only woman Jiho ever loved. Or at least the poems said so. She was a woman from the mainland, a princess in a village Jiho robbed and then burned. Out of the flames, the only survivor of the great war effort, came out Terra. She was wounded, burnt and crying in anguish. Jiho took one look at her and decided he was in love, for so terrible was her beauty and his control was already complete, nothing for him to fight for. He took her back to the Jeon castle on the hills of Uzam, the only silent volcano on the islands of Udo. Uzam spewed fire with no warning, earthquakes or waves, just liquid death swallowing everything in its path and all the Fire Lords spoke about it like it was hell on earth.

Terra went with Jiho, for she had no choice. Jiho took her to his chambers, for his love gave him no choice either.

The rooms had no walls, doors or windows, they were just a block of stone open to the Outer Ocean, waves and sky the only sight to overlook all his possessions. She could have jumped off of the cliff, for there was nothing stopping her, no chains or ropes or threats of a mad Fire Lord. Terra lived and Jiho loved, both completely in vain. A year after he took her from her village, she gave birth to Jungkook. And then and there is where the love story twisted. Jiho didn’t need a son to inherit his rule, so any child would do, and any child would live, for the sake of a mother he loved. Except that Terra gave birth to a shapeshifter.

Shifters were born rarely, among all the tribes of the world, and they were a curse everywhere. The legends said they were the children of when magic went wrong, the parents were cursed and dark times awaited their folk, harbingers of ruin and death. They couldn’t be controlled and would kill everything in sight, starting with the body they came out of.

And so it was. Jiho could have forgiven almost anything being wrong with the child of a woman he loved, even if it had no powers over fire. But that child killed Terra in front of him, while he was ripping the hellish animal from her flesh, and even while it turned and settled into a little boy with innocent, large doe eyes, he couldn’t forgive it.

He didn’t kill Jungkook, but imprisoned him, only until he decided what to do and to mourn for his woman. And then time passed and he still didn’t decide. The child had her face, when it wasn’t an animal.

So Jungkook lived the first few months, sleeping on a cliff rock carved in black volcanic stone, dressed in rags and fed scraps, shivering and cold and abandoned. But then Jiho realized it takes a lot to kill a shifter. They could be whatever they wanted, as long as they knew the animal shape well enough. That is how domestication of a hated child into a weapon of war started.

Jeongon adored the idea of his little brother honed into a killing beast that would answer to his every whim. Jungkook learned to fight and claw and wound before he learned how to read. But, and this was not a thing Jiho or any of the Fire Lords could have predicted, he was not a mindless animal that thirsted for darkness and blood. Jungkook was just a boy, even if he was raised to remember he took his mother’s life with his first breath. He could feel fear more than he could rage and sadness more than hunger for any battle. He could cry and despair and hope, dream of someone, anyone, that would look at him and see a human child, scared out of his mind. Most importantly, he adapted to this life he had, not because he didn’t suspect there is anything else, but because he was a survivor.

Jiho had enemies among the Folk he ruled over, of course, some of them under his very nose, living in his castle and cooking his food and feeding his children. Sometimes, when the Fire Lord couldn’t see, these poor kind people would take care of Jiho’s unfortunate child. Jungkook detested pity, but it took words, touches, hugs and smiles, friends and bites of delicious food made just for him to teach him what pity was in the first place. They didn’t mean much by it, except that he was a child hated but in pain, and they couldn’t show anything but empathy.

When Jungkook was thirteen, Jeongon married a princess of the Wind Folk, and she and her royal guards were the best magical people to ever walk onto the soil of Uzam. Jihyon didn’t like her new home at all, but Jiho’s smile clearly implied she had no choice but to stay as a wife of the future Fire King. Jungkook was introduced as a dangerous son of the Jeon Lord that was crazy with bloodlust and better left alone at all times. And yet, the look she gave him, something wild, sad and defiant at the same time, it stayed with him for years after. She was beautiful and elegant, a powerful burst of wind in their lives, unmarred by the disfigured black crown they tried to get on her head, and Jungkook was amazed by how obviously free she was, even while trapped.

Jeongon organized a battle tournament in celebration of his marriage, of course, and this is where the end began. He insisted that he would fight all the great Fire Knights by himself, one by one. His brother was a force in a battle, Jungkook had to admit that, as much as he detested his brutal need to humiliate and claim ownership over everything. But that day, in front of the entire castle, Jeongon asked to fight Jungkook. Maybe it was because he wanted to humiliate the animal too, and maybe Jiho didn’t stop him because he truly counted with his Prince winning.

Jungkook was trained to be the ultimate weapon and while under control during long days of lessons, something slipped free that day. Not the animal form, for Jungkook didn’t shift a single time, unwilling to do it in front of people that would find it a reminder of his horrible nature. He stayed human and since he couldn’t control fire or fight with flames like Jeongon did, he got burned more times than he remembered it hurting.

But he won.

Somehow, when the haze of a fight lifted, on the other side there was only silence of a surprised castle, Jiho’s shocked face twisted in anger and Jeongon lying underneath Jungkook’s feet, bloody and broken, maybe dead or maybe alive. He didn’t stay long enough to find out. In his father’s eyes, Jungkook saw the same hate he usually did, but this time magnified by humiliation and he knew he has to run if he wants to live.

Udo is just a group of islands and the ocean of water that the Fire Folk don’t like that much turned out to be a perfect escape route for a shifter. The first shape that Jungkook ever took was that of a wolf, a forest creature foreign to Udo, but natural to him as a baby. But the first shape Jungkook willingly learned, observing the feeding frenzy that followed every time Jiho killed prisoners by throwing them off a ledge of a ship, was a shark. When he came close to the mainland, obviously too fast for Jiho’s rage to follow him, he slipped into his wolf form and ran along the coast until he found a forest to hide in.

Being free was a universe of feelings, doubts, fears and tears, endless tears. But most of them were in relief and it took him weeks to stop turning over his human shoulder in panic as soon as something made a sound in the forest. Jungkook learned to live alone, instinct and determination, a wild thing set loose, finally. Jiho never found him.

But a few months later, his mother’s people did. They were strange, dressed in long, white cloths and silent, so silent they managed to sneak up on a shifter in his sleep. Jungkook almost killed three of them in blind panic before an old man knocked him out with a staff. When he woke up, they were still there, but they didn’t tie him up and they gave him food, drink and space, as much as he needed. He didn’t trust them, of course, for trust was a skill he couldn’t afford to lose. But these were woodland druids, and even if he didn’t know it then, Jungkook learned afterwards that they usually had enough patience to wait out a doubtful human.

“And you are. Human, I mean.”, the old man said, predicting Jungkook’s doubts and fears in a manner that left him exposed. He didn’t like it, but he did like being called human instead of an animal. Step by step and week by week, the druids shared what they knew with him, about the world and its people and, finally, Jungkook.

Terra was one of them, they said, a priestess of magic that lived in the forest on the other side of the Great Desert. She came to the end of the forest to visit a village when Jiho attacked. He almost killed her too, but failed, and then she watched him, from the flames and among the bodies, a man as cruel and foreign to her as could be. But more than anything else, an evil man. She wanted to run away, but Jiho wanted her. And he took her, against her will and to her shock. Druids lived connected to each other and the world. Terra screamed in so much pain and in such rage for so long after he took her, a warning and a cry for help, but the other druids could only listen and wait. Then, she had Jungkook.

“That is how shifters are made. What they call twisted magic is just the rage of a witch.”, they said, and Jungkook sobbed into his palms until they trembled too hard to wipe any tears away and the druids hugged him, like a lost child that didn’t belong, not even there. 

He left them soon after, heading across the desert, to anywhere else. He ran away from Jiho and the druids, reminders of demons he was born to carry and battles he didn’t want to fight. Terra allowed him to be born so he could live on to kill her torturer, and Jiho raised him perfectly capable to execute that purpose, but he didn’t want it. No matter where the roads led, they screamed in other options, alternate destinies, any path that wouldn’t end up soaked in blood.

At the end of his journey, he stopped in Rai, the Earth Kingdom capital. He became what they called a slave, but Jungkook saw it as a life of luxury, safety and a forgotten, irrelevant existance. Training to join the royal household, he hadn’t shifted in months, trying so hard to be simply human. He never avoided his true nature for that long before and it all came to haunt him when he shifted in front of the Crown Prince. Terrified, Jungkook tried turning back to human, but Seokjin was not the kind of a royal monster that Jungkook was used to. The stupid Prince extended his hand towards him, like he couldn’t bite it clean off. And he looked at him, straight into Jungkook’s eyes, like he trusted him and saw him, inside, truly him, not the druid, the witch, the animal or the Fire Lord Prince. Just Jungkook. Being looked at like that shifted the plates in Jungkook’s internal universe from scared to something magical in a completely new way. He never said it to Seokjin, but Jungkook later thought that he learned what love was that night.

So he stayed. And Seokjin the Crown Prince leaned on him, ridiculously, like he needed Jungkook and couldn’t comprehend that he was the best, most noble and deserving person to ever live. Just because Jungkook loved him, didn’t mean he could say it, or even show it. Jungkook lived an inside life of things that hurt and ones that hurt less and words or gestures couldn’t shape themselves around things that didn’t hurt at all.

Besides, Jungkook was a servant, a slave, a life he fought for was an insignificant existence on the sidelines, a darkness so deep brewing in his soul that he would spoil all the undeserving angels of this world, including Seokjin.

But Jiho never rested and even if Jungkook forgot about the war ships built from the forests in which his mother used to live, the rest of the world didn’t. King Taeon knew it and he started the game of war with the wrong person. Jungkook knew who would lose, obviously, and as soon as the chess board was set and he heard the allies of the Earth Kingdom were coming, he knew it was time to leave this path the dared stop and rest on.

He didn’t comprehend what leaving meant to people who didn’t want you dead or gone, of course, so stealing some of Seokjin’s clothes and shifting into the night seemed the only obvious choice.

It wasn’t easy, of course, but Jungkook always told himself he was born to be a weapon and they would find him and wield him, someone would, and then he would be bloody and used and finished, irredeemable, a thing nobody would look at like he was human again. Now that he knew how it felt, that warmth and importance, a significant gaze and a budding smile, forming just for him, he couldn’t let the weapon overcome what he really, desperately, wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Jungkook: South Fire Kingdom/Son of the Fire Lord/Shapeshifter/ No animal companion_


	8. MAP / The Dawn of Everything Cover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I updated (and will continue to update) this fic with"true" chapter covers and the map of the world it is set in - this will be posted in between the end of each previous "unit" and before the start of the next one.


	9. The Dawn Of Everything - The Roads Less Traveled

_ **2.1. Jimin / The Roads Less Traveled** _

Jimin’s mother was a self-exiled queen of the Water Court, a ghost of the greatest love of the Water King’s life, drenched in guilt and anger. When he remarried, it was a custom and obligation that made him, or at least he claimed it to be so.

Mother remained the First Wife, the Queen, a myth of grace and tears that ghosted the walls of the palace and all the royal beaches, forever unhappy and distant. Jimin grew up watching her disappear bit by bit, like foam on the cusp of waves, and she never allowed anyone close enough to pull her out. Father tried, or at least he did as much as he found possible to do.

Sometimes, Jimin would spot them, the parents of the Cursed child, sitting in privacy at the Great Western Shore, close enough to remind each other they were still there and yet never touching. She would go out first, sit for hours and watch the sea like it could give her answers. He would follow sometime later, concerned and loving, a King lost without his compass.

It seemed that whatever cursed the child traveled through time within the bloodline, staining them all away from happiness. Mother rarely talked to Jimin, or even at him, watching her child like it delights and pains her to see him grow up, and that paradox was what she eventually turned into.

Father looked at him with a paradox of his own, concerned with the only child of his that came of the woman he actually loved, and also hurt by a reminder of a failure that shattered her away from him.  
Maybe, if there was no Jimin, they would be a happy family, a King and Queen that grew old in wisdom instead of insanity.

The mother of his brother and sister and the second wife was a woman plagued with demons of whispers and competitions, status and titles, and Jimin was a thorn in her side. She had a face that was a grimace of the consensus mood of any room and two children that lived confused and lost among all of them, thorn between privilege and terror. They called her the False Queen and she knew it, but it was the King who first called her so and his word was law.

Father saw his true heirs only on official functions. Jimin knew more about his brother and sister, even if it was all too little to matter and call them family. The King simply behaved like they were someone else’s children that will take his crown one day. Duty completed, he paraded them around like they mattered, while making it known they had no point at all, beyond what they were born to do.

Jimin was fifteen when Father tried to seal a contract of his marriage proposal to a rogue Water General that led a rebellion up in the North. They were scared of the rebels gaining power, so a hand of anyone available at the Court benefited the Kingdom. It was his duty and an honor to even be considered after years of embarrassment he provided to everyone, said the royal advisers. Father nodded in that usual way of his and Jimin shook his head and cried out, uselessly resisting what he knew was not a choice of his. The General was an old, savage and careless man, and even if he wasn’t, Jimin was a boy with a crush on one of the Wind Princes, not a bargaining figure. Or so he tried to argue, but Father looked through him during the entire meeting on which it was announced.

In the end, it was Mother who saved him, rising from apathy like a scorned siren to shout profanities against anyone taking her son away. Jimin was grateful and beyond happy to be able to stay in the only home he had ever known, but he felt it was for possession and not love that she did it.

Later, when his brother and sister were already promised to royals of the world and Jimin was forgotten long enough for glances to blossom into kisses when him and Taehyung were alone, Mother never spoke to him about his future at the Court at all.

It was a thought that remained on Jimin’s mind ever since Taehyung left for the Earth Kingdom. He promised to wait and that is what he intended to do. But there were dreams and hopes stacked as high as Taehyung’s flying mountains in his head, of places and lives and loves he could have somewhere else, anywhere else but here, where he knew for a fact he could never be happy. Would Father even let him go, or would Mother care this time, if it was him who tried to leave? He honestly didn’t know, even while the lives of others happened around him.

It was a few weeks after Taehyung left that Mother came to him, for the first time in years. She appeared in his chambers at sundown one day, carrying a gift of a pearl necklace. That in itself was highly unusual, for Jimin couldn’t remember a time when either of his parents gave him anything in person.

He bowed in front of her and remained standing, trained posture and a firm grip on his own hands behind his back. Mother didn’t look at him at first, surveying the room in detail.

Eventually, she settled on a chair next to the balcony overlooking the royal beach and turned to the water.

“Do you want to live here Jimin?”, she said, voice mellow and emotionless, taking him completely by surprise.

“Mother?”, he asked, staring at her back.

“In the Castle of the Water King, at this Court, where you were born? Are you happy?”, she repeated, more words than he was used to at once.

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he kept quiet, trying to predict what this was about and failing, miserably.

“I think you will never be anything else but forgotten and ignored here son.”, she said simply and not turning around, like it was an obvious thing that he should’ve known.

Jimin opened his mouth, but no sound came out.  
What was he supposed to say?

“This Curse will always follow you here. It is to blame for all of the misfortune we have endured. There is no cure to it that I could find. Your Father has stopped searching a long time ago. There is nothing for you here.”

In the middle of her speaking, Jimin realized both of her arms were shaking at her sides, but he didn’t know from what. He wanted badly to go up to her and hug her, hide in her arms and never come out to face the truths she faced him with so roughly. But they didn’t hug. Obviously, they didn’t even bother with the words that might be crushing each other. Stripped raw by the obtuse nature of how she said it, Jimin found other words to say.

“It isn’t the Curse that is making it impossible for me to live happy Mother, but you and Father finding your happiness my responsibility.”

Her back stiffened and Jimin’s jaw clenched up by itself, awaiting the reaction like a summer storm.

But there was nothing. He spoke his truth and it might have been a children’s play tune that he uttered, for Mother didn’t look him in the eye when she finally turned.

He wanted to shout a million things, the “Look at me!”, “Why can’t you love me?!”, “I didn’t ask to be yours or to be Cursed!” and all the rest multiplying in his head until it left him breathless and nothing more came out. Absentmindedly, he realized there are tears soaking his cheeks and that was already a face she would not care for. What did he have to cry for – they kept him alive and fed and clothed and what else did he possibly think he deserved after existing and ruining a Kingdom by it?

She never looked at his face, even though she must have seen the tears in the soft candle light.

Slowly, she moved towards him and looked up, above his head and towards the door, like it offered things this failure of her own flesh never could.

“That may be so. Regardless, you should consider leaving here. Go somewhere your Curse doesn’t matter. Maybe with that brutish Wind child you keep around.”

Stoic, elegant and cruelly absent, she graced him with that final blow of words and then walked away, like the room was empty and there was no child of hers standing alone, bathed in ever-dying light.

Life would have gone on in its usual, boring and emotionless pattern of obligations and sleepless nights, even after mother came to Jimin to deliver whatever the hell that message was. He didn’t give the actual meaning of it much thought, hurt anew by her careless, certain malice. It mattered not what she said, for she said it out of anguish and there were no paths for her to follow except these ones in which her curse was her own child. At the end of every tear that trickled down Jimin’s face was the truth, when he remembered: she was still his mother, loved or not, and he was still her son, cursed or exiled.

Besides, leaving was not an option. This is the only place where Taehyung would find him, the first one where he would search, and Jimin would never stop waiting after he promised that he would. There were truths in his heart that reigned over all of his emotional states, emergency protocols for every despairing situation, and loving Taehyung enough to hold on until they were together again was the first commandment. Safety was the lean, carefree embrace of arms that never threatened the air in his lungs, smell of sea salt and laughter like wind chimes fluttering through his hair, smiling kisses on his neck and slender fingers intertwined with his small, scared hands when they hovered on Tiny’s back somewhere far away from the land. It took years of living in the Water Kingdom before Jimin went to places from which he couldn’t see the soil anymore, and it was because of Taehyung. He would wait, and mother would just have to ignore him existing as a reminder of all things painful for a while longer.

It was too soon to go back upon his word, when father called him to the Royal Chamber. A meeting there meant there were delicate matters to discuss at hand, something the King couldn’t risk anyone else overhearing. Jimin got dressed in official royal robes before going, combed his hair and tried to hide the ugly bags under his eyes. Appearances were often all the royal family needed to keep track of, unless they had any other purpose, and Jimin had the least of it.

The King didn’t look up when he entered, focused on a papyrus scroll on the table. His shoulders were hunched over, forehead creased and fists trembling slightly, if not from old age then from habit of stress over official business. Jimin never imagined his father to be a man capable of being at peace, even if there existed a world in which he would have that option.

“I have been informed about something that is of interest for you. And to prevent any foolish delay in your royal duties to this Kingdom and to me, I found it best that I inform you, personally and now. Son.”, the King said, adding the last word like a punch to the chest, a reminder for both of them that it didn’t and never would fall gently and effortlessly from his lips toward Jimin.

He lifted his head a bit higher and looked at father in eyes, or he would have, if the King looked at him. The walls beyond Jimin’s head must’ve been perpetually glorious, for it consistently seemed both his mother and father were enamored with them.

“The Wind Prince you are fond off, the foolish boy that wouldn’t leave you alone...”, father started and his eyes snapped to Jimin’s, just for a second, as if to check does he have his full attention.

“He is dead.”

The crash of these words upon Jimin’s ears was loud and deaf at the same time, and air was thinned out from the room like Taehyung was there and Gods…

“Tae…”, Jimin heard himself say, far and distant and the world snapped in half in front of him. His hands clenched, briefly twitching towards the King. He was the source of this tragedy, the words came from him, and Jimin wanted to strike and hurt for the first time in his life, just so those damn sounds would get erased from existence. Taehyung couldn’t be… He wasn’t, it wasn’t possible, for Jimin’s world didn’t burn in sorrow until the lie was spoken.

“You are lying.”, he said eventually, hoarse and tortured words that struggled to get out.

This was finally enough of an accusation for father to look at him, surprise evident in the crease on his forehead.

“I am most certainly not lying, and you would do good to remember who you are talking to in that tone.”

Jimin barely heard him, panicked attention scattering around his own mind for a clue, any inclination of a feeling that might have some sense to it. He didn’t notice the tears running down his cheeks, yet again and they must have been abundant, since the King focused on them like a hawk on its prey.

“Wipe your face Jimin. You are a royal, like it or not, and I will not have you disgrace my Kingdom and myself as King with childish tantrums over some unfortunate misfit, foreign royalty or not. Listen to me!”, he shouted, slamming both his fists on the table in front of him and Jimin jumped, snapped back in his own body and that cursed room.  
“The official meeting of the royal ambassadors started two evenings ago. Everyone whose presence was expected was reported as present. Except the young Wind Prince, who was never seen in the Earth Kingdom at all. He is still presumed missing of course, but even the Wind Lord himself agreed to start the period of lament.”

Jimin stared at him in bewilderment.

“Is nobody searching for him?! He is a royal, this is absolutely against protocol, nobody would kill a Prince, they would at least ask for a ransom!”, his shouts echoed through the Royal Chamber and a guard coughed in front of the room, as if to remind the King of his presence.

“The bloody fool was traveling alone! No royal that is not directly searching for trouble would disobey protocol like that!”, the King roared back.

Jimin opened his mouth to shout the truth he knew back – that Taehyung wasn’t given a royal guard when he left. His own father dismissed him alone, without needing to be asked to. In return, Taehyung didn’t ask for any protection, too proud and stubbornly clinging to this glimmer of freedom he tasted.

But then it dawned on him. The Wind Lord was already grieving for a lost son. The Earth Kingdom had an excuse of no sightings to deny their responsibility. Taehyung was seen at the Water Court before he left, saying his goodbyes to Jimin, a foreign royal he was publicly courting. This was a tragedy in three acts and the hero was already buried. Alive or dead, nobody was going to look for him, for this version of events benefited everyone.

He remained silent and the King must have interpreted that as a sign of agreement or common sense in Jimin. He nodded and sat back down, glancing at the papyrus scroll again.

“I expect you to deal with this loss gracefully and in solitude. And when you have gathered your wits, your further royal duties await.”

“What… what duties?”

The King was impatient to have to raise his head again from whatever was on the damn paper in front of him.

“A reasonable mourning period is acceptable, even expected. But after that, you are to continue being courted by the next acceptable suitor in line. And this one I will choose Jimin, because if this failure is proof of anything it is that you are not capable of choosing a fitting one.”

He was dismissed and grateful for the lonely cold of the marble hallway around the Royal Chamber. The guards let him pass and turned around, so Jimin felt it is acceptable to allow a full body shiver to rock him against the walls. Breath suddenly came with difficulties he usually associated with drowning, and it was so disorienting that his finger scratched against the smooth surfaces in search of something. Or rather someone, for it was just Taehyung’s face that swam towards him again, from whatever walking nightmare depths he found himself in.

“You cannot be dead.”

He whispered it into the night and a hot breath on an early spring evening made the words visible in the moonlight darkness. This is all it was. An illusion, a challenge, a decoy someone made and Jimin was done with impossible magic that deceived him. Damn the curses and fate and all the bloody rules that shaped his steps without asking him. Taehyung left and now something or someone took him further, somewhere where they thought Jimin can’t and won’t follow. It made him angry, the quiet and simmering, furious kind, at whoever dared play with his heart and his tears and his life again.

It was the morning of the last dawn he would ever see in the Water Kingdom, a few hours later. Silence, except the waves, distant, eternal and taken for granted. It followed him out the main castle and down the beach towards the road, hidden in a simple woolen robe. His eyes were following Jansu among the waves, swimming towards their meeting point further down the coast, where the Great Western Road began. Jimin was angry and silent and the motion of his feet on the sand fell deaf on this cursed home he was leaving. And maybe, if he stopped long enough in his own head, there would be time enough to realize the most terrifying fear of them all – that Taehyung knew and left him and his equally miserable life on his own, finding solace in some other home, with another name and another life, where Jimin had no place or embrace to travel for. But he was only angry, at all of the fears at the tips of his mind first and foremost, and then at everything else that he saw or touched.

On the last pillar rock of the royal beach, up on the cliff side where the dawn first broke, about an hour away from the Castle, cloaked in her royal robes stood mother. Jimin was not surprised, or he didn’t allow himself to be so. She saw him, was waiting for him, and then watched him pass in silence, no embrace or tears or words exchanged.

“It doesn’t matter.”, he said to himself a few steps away from her. And in that moment, maybe for the first time in his life, if truly didn’t.

Maybe she would look after him, or maybe she wouldn’t.

Maybe Taehyung was alive and well and left him on purpose.

And maybe the Curse would rampage after its victim now that he left it chained to the walls of his childhood prison, leaving it behind in possessions and lessons learned alike. Perhaps the Claimed Man would raise from the sea and drown the entire Kingdom in fury now that his chosen Cursed Hair went away.

Maybe and perhaps and it all could be, and yet, it didn’t matter at all.


	10. The Dawn Of Everything - The Walls We Break

_ **2.2 Hoseok/Jin / The Walls We Break** _

Rai was a city in the sense of what Hoseok’s parents wanted to rule: orderly, clean, presentable. Or at least those rumors carried the fame of it across the lands. In reality, beggars and homeless children ran amok in the streets, not paying any attention to the royal parade of Hoseok and Hoseok that rode in on two exhausted horses after they ditched the assigned guards at the main entrance to the city. Shae was a star though, as expected of a tiger that walked into a mountainous city. Kids ran towards her like they could pet her or play with her, and maybe they would be able to, if there were children of the _proper_ kingdom. But here, Shae and Wonho had a pact of making Hoseok look like a royal authority, a menace of skinny limbs and inquisitive eyes that he was.

“Don’t smile so much, please, just… don’t.”, Wonho whispered to him as they rode and Hoseok must have pouted in confusion, for Wonho made a grimace and yelped at Shae, who crossed her eyes and walked ahead, trying to set a scary example for her foolish, naive human.

“Why am I supposed to be an asshole to be royal again?”, Hoseok asked, trying to school his face in a controlled, impassive expression, something that truly didn’t come natural to him.

“Not an asshole. Just untouchable.”, Wonho murmured and flexed an entire arm at the guard observing them from the entrance to the Great Hall. The man was obviously entranced, more so by the huge, handsome Wonho and an elegant tiger than Hoseok’s scrawny figure trying to keep all of his friendly impulses at bay and probably managing to look constipated in the process.

“I _am_ untouchable. Shae is a fucking tiger and you are double the size of any man in this country. While I have both of you on my side, I should be allowed to relax and enjoy the scenery, no?”, Hoseok said, lifting his head to look at the high ceiling of the Great Hall of Rai, famously carved in the bones of the mountain, dark and looming above. It was illuminated by candles and chandeliers, and above it all a clap of bat wings resonated in the the vastness of the darkness. It smelled like freshly cut grass, the walls decorated with cuttings upon cuttings of flowers and leaves, eerily green in the artificial light that engulfed the daylight beyond the Gate. And the Gate itself was a miracle of masonry, two giant statues of armed soldiers, menacing and ancient, a warning of a welcome. This was a place sunlight never touched, and maybe because of that, Hoseok felt unsure of his own body, somehow attacked and excluded by the air itself. His parents came to visit here, when Hoseok wasn’t born yet, and remembered it fondly in their stories. Now, seeing what it actually was, he understood why they didn’t hesitate to send their disappointing heir here to do whatever he needed to do. Maybe, just maybe, it would turn him rougher and tougher.

Up front, where the massive throne was, there was a small gathering of children in Earth Kingdom robes. Hoseok stared ahead, not trusting himself to judge what he was seeing.

“Are those_ all_ the royal children that arrived? That is the great Gathering that the Earth King demanded? And you thought we would be late!”, he pushed Wonho in jest, but the man was weirdly quiet. Finally, he halted his horse and signaled for Hoseok to do the same, waving a nearby servant to take the reins. Hoseok landed on his feet next to Shae, who rubbed against his calves while sitting in front of him, like a menacing guard in front of an ancient king.

“Listen to me. Please, whatever you do, just listen to me.”, Wonho said, turning away from the throne and awaiting officials, as if ready to receive orders from his royal in charge. Hoseok stared at him, still like a statue.

“Don’t tell me you spotted a fucking cave spider on me somewhere Wonho, I will scream this place down.”, he tried to joke, but Wonho’s face contorted in a grimace of something even worse.

“They expect a royal Your Highness. A pure breed, classic, stone-cold asshole of a Prince. And if you see what they managed to gather until now, you also see that the mission hasn’t gone quite well yet. You are the only high ranking foreign royal here Your Grace. What does that tell you Hoseok?”, Wonho asked, achieving grimaces scarier warriors would be envious of.

Hoseok waved his head in negation of understanding. Obviously, royal children they desired failed to show up, and, to make matters worse, they managed to get a mockery of them all as the most important guest.

“It tells you that, whatever game they are playing, you just became a highly relevant piece. Don’t let them play you. You play them.”, Wonho said, bowing in front of him, as if to buy time before they both have to turn towards the throne and greet their hosts.

“You are properly scaring me. What do you mean “play them”? I am an insignificant figure, there are no goals I play for.”, Hoseok said, staring at the top of Wonho’s bowed head. He hated when people bowed to him. It was humiliating for everyone involved.

“Don’t be scared. Make them scared.”, Wonho said, bowing away to clear Hoseok’s path towards the throne.

Slowly, Hoseok stepped forward, limbs stiff and face frozen in whatever grimace of importance he could muster.

_I have no clue what am I doing_, he thought to himself and still walked on.

The King was sitting alone on the throne and staring down at Hoseok in all his royal, self-important assholery.

Sooner than he would have liked, Hoseok was there. Wonho bowed next to him, Shae sat her bottom down on the cold floor and stared at the King like he isn’t worth a thing in the world and all the eyes of the royal children and the Earth Court were on Hoseok.

“Prince Hoseok of the Great East Fire Kingdom your Highness.”, he said, finding a stability of voice somewhere deep down within himself.

The King nodded and raised an eyebrow, as he expected something to follow the introduction. As far-fetched as the presented title itself went though, this was more than enough for Hoseok’s taste. He was scared of most scary things, monsters and bugs and dark caves, but entitled royals didn’t make the list, nor did they ever. If he could raise his voice against his own father and uncle, a King of any other place wouldn’t bother him in the least.

“I believe you called for someone from our court?”, he said, straightening his spine up like how he saw snakes do in the desert. He hated snakes, was terrified of them actually. But the King Asshole that stared at him didn’t know that. Wonho exhaled in exasperation and maybe a hint of pride, and Shae definitely lifted a whisker in amusement.

“Yes, I did Prince Hoseok. How prudent of you to obey.”, the King said and Hoseok lifted his head an inch taller. This was a taunt and Hoseok knew enough about bullies to let it slide.

“Of course Your Highness, the Great Fire Kingdom prides itself on good relations with all Kingdoms. I can’t fail to observe not many other royals offered the same kindness as to answer your call?”, and he looked around, as if to point out the poor state of the matters met. The children gathered around them looked down and away like the taunt wasn’t aimed at them. But the true jewel of reactions was a handsome royal sitting on the King’s side, pretty and regal as they come, but with a jaw dropped comically in shock, like he forgot to pick it up after Hoseok spoke. Feeling encouraged by utter silence that fell on the Court, Hoseok winked at him, causing Wonho to drop his head low again in disappointment, and an adorable blush to appear on the royals face.

“I am sure you will be joined with a plethora of royals of your liking very soon Prince Hoseok, perhaps a bit higher than your rank, but still… it should do.”, the King said finally, obviously aware that taunting the only foreigner in the Court, and one for which said Court apparently stopped short of movement and breath, didn’t play so well in his favor.

“The Prince of Light needs to rest.”, Wonho boomed beside him and Hoseok almost laughed out loud at that.

_Prince of fucking what?_, he rose a silent eyebrow at Wonho and got a blank stare back. Shae got up and stretched like a a royal cat she was.

“Of course. I can escort you personally to your rooms.”, the handsome man that couldn’t stop blushing said, raising from his chair and stepping towards Hoseok.

He looked at Hoseok like a child looks at a playmate their own age though, despite the rosy cheeks and Hoseok wondered how fast can Wonho inform him from which family the handsome royal was. Obviously someone relevant enough in the Earth Kingdom to gain a seat close to the King. A royal advisory maybe?

“Father, if you will excuse us.”, he then said and Hoseok was grateful that he turned away a moment earlier, for he was the one that had a loose jaw now.

“Your Highness, Crown Prince Seokjin.”, Wonho said, bowing to both and looking at Hoseok like he wishes to smack him over the head in front of the entire Court.

Half an hour later, when the now grinning Prince escorted them to their rooms and Hoseok squeaked out their gratitude, after the door closed and they were alone, he did just that.

“You idiot!”, he hissed at Hoseok and it was truly scary how fast he dropped the “Your Highness” routine.

“What do you want from me?! You said to be scary!”, Hoseok said, already sinking to the floor in mortification.

“Yeah, and I meant tell him you are an accomplished warrior and imply you can slaughter half of his army, or at least the part that your pet tiger and guard can’t take care of! I didn’t mean taunt him, piss him off and then flirt with his fucking son!”

Hoseok groaned, hiding behind his hands. Shae put her head on his knee and looked at him with that mixture of exasperation and love she reserved strictly for him.

The next day, Hoseok planned to sneak out of the rooms and go explore Rai, beginning with that awaited outside the caves. But Wonho was in front of his door, white-faced and visibly upset about something.

“Don’t tell me. The King wants me to marry Prince Seokjin, since I dishonored his reputation yesterday.”

“I went to the royal kitchens and I met a boy. A man. I mean, I don’t know how old, but he was so well-spoken and then also his face, his eyes, I don’t know… His eyes Hoseok!”, Wonho blabbed at him, not detecting the haste with which Hoseok dropped his prepared sneak-out bag and marching in the room as soon as there was place in the doorway for him to barge through.

“Right...”, Hoseok said, amused and forgetting all about the explorations.

“He had them I assume? At the usual place in the head?”

Wonho stared at him and frowned, obviously.

“The eyes Wonho. What about the boy-mans eyes?”, he chuckled, expecting to be ignored. But Wonho was obviously under the spell of a first crush and shyness of epic proportions, so this was maybe to be expected. Eventually. Not overnight though. Or over breakfast, as it appeared to be the case.

“They were the prettiest eyes I have ever seen.”. Wonho said and Hoseok bit his lip, trying to hold in laughter and then blinked his own up at Wonho, pouting like a roadside prostitute he pretended he never saw on their way here.

“Oh? You don’t say. Well, there goes my heart.”, and he cackled like a beast when Wonho swung a mace he called a hand at him.

“I went to get your food. And he talked to me and then it was two hours later and I completely forgot.”

“You wound me deeper and deeper my friend.”, Hoseok sighed, pointing at the empty breakfast platter on the table, the contents of which were hidden in the sneak-out bag, but Wonho wouldn’t know that.

“I think I would like to talk to him again.”, Wonho said, looking at Hoseok like he is asking for permission and the royal cackled again.

“You don’t say. And here I thought you would hide in my rooms forever. Why did you even come to bother me then, if the boy-man is somewhere in reach of your besotted staring?”

Wonho seemed to sober up a bit at that, love-drunk as he was.

“Oh, of course. News. I have news for you.”

“My eyes aren’t gonna turn prettier the more you wait, you know.”, Hoseok smiled after Wonho drifted off towards the windows. He didn’t lose time in closing it and creeping closer to Hoseok.

“He is an architect, so he told me that they are building a reinforcement wall around the inner caves of Rai. A large one, impenetrable.”, Wonho leaned in close, as if on a conspiracy.

“Rai is already impenetrable.”

“Yes, that is what I thought too. If they are building another layer of protection over the safest place on the continent, well… Whatever is coming, maybe you should try to get us to stick around?”

Hoseok pondered it seriously while teasing Wonho about the real reason he wanted to stick around. After a long questioning, he got out of Wonho that the architects name was Changkyun (and he talked a mile a minute and joked with a straight face and truly had magical eyes and so on) and the walls being built were on the south of the city. Encouraging Wonho to go lose time on stalking this angel he met (on accident, he swore), he managed to sneak out of the rooms in the afternoon that same day.

Rai was a complicated maze of tunnels and paths carved in stone, where people lived on top of each other in rooms only big enough for cats to curl up in. Strangely enough, when he was told stories about the great fortress of seven palaces in the Endless Mountain, there was no mention of the fact that the impenetrable city lay hidden in caves, everything from gardens to kitchens imported inside, where lanterns burned and sunlight never visited. Also, the city was no proud, rich metropolis, unconquerable and dressed in gold, as he was thought before. Rai was just a city, with the royal and the rich hidden from view and a million poor souls attached to its outer, exposed parts.

The royal guards and court members looked well-kept and marched proudly through the commoners, who milled around in constant effort to finish this or that and procure payment for it. Hoseok kept giving the poor children begging for scraps his golden coins, managing to get directions to the South Exit. When he finally peaked over the wooden barricade separating the living quarters of Rai from the ditch around the massive stone blocks being hauled into place, dark was descending on the city and people were leaving the passages they called streets. But the Wall, or whatever they called this massive thing being built, that was there. Curious beyond his rights, Hoseok tried to stay unnoticed until the fence slipped away and he could peek inside. People were brushing past him like nobody cared he was there at all, rushing to their families and trampling over the beggars that cropped up along the city border in irregular intervals. When he almost reached his destination, a child younger than anyone he saw begging until now cropped up in front of him, dirty smudges of mud across his tiny hands, outstretched in supplication and a pair of big, pleading eyes in a tiny head. He knelt in front of the boy and stretched his hand out, when a foreign hand grasped his shoulder and hauled him up.

Yelping in surprise, he turned around with fists raised, but his attacker stopped him by simply removing the scarf he wore around his face.

“Prince Seokjin?!”, Hoseok shouted and said Prince smacked a hand against his mouth and dragged him off back towards the city too quickly to resist. He was tall and built like a warrior, or at least an elegant and courageous royal that soldiers wanted to die for and Hoseok mostly had only his sharp, pointy elbows to threaten people with, so resistance was somewhat futile. His mouth stayed firmly covered by the Prince’s hand though, and what he couldn’t do in a fight, Hoseok could accomplish by shocking the royal, so he bravely licked across his palm and then bit on the hand that flinched away.

“Fucking hell!”, the Prince shouted, still dragging him along, but throwing a disbelieving look his way, as if to reprimand his behavior. But the damage has been done, for anyone wanting to kidnap Hoseok should have informed himself beforehand not to let his mouth loose under any circumstances. As loudly as he could, Hoseok started howling for help and the Prince jumped in shock and scrambled them both away from a street where everyone stared at them and into a room with no other people in it.

“Shut up, you will get both of us strangled!”, he hissed, his handsome face morphed into a grimace of general surprise.

“You can’t kidnap me! I will fight you!”, Hoseok said, pushing at the Prince’s arms and digging his pointy fingertips into firm flesh to be released from his grip.

“I am trying to save your life you royal brat!”, he whisper-shouted and slapped at Hoseok’s disturbing hands.

“What?”, Hoseok stopped, looking the Prince up and down.

“The beggar boy you stopped for was a trap. They would have robbed you and then killed you, disposing of your body in the wall ditch, like is common for a rich idiot that wanders to the poorest part of Rai!”, he hissed again.

“You can’t know that!”, Hoseok rebelled, but dropped his voice to a whisper anyway, admitting to himself that a poor beggar child popping up in front of him of all people did seem a bit suspicious.

“Of course I can, I am the fucking Earth Prince! This is my city!”

“If it is your city, why didn’t you stop them then, instead of dragging me away like a sack of potatoes?!”

The Prince looked at him for a long time, frowning and huffing in distress. Finally, expecting Hoseok won’t shout or make a run for it, he released his hands and stepped back.

“They hate the royals in Rai. They would kill you because they are hungry, but me… I would have been for pleasure.”, he said this in a resigned tone. Hoseok looked at him properly now, cloaked by scarves and the darkness of the room, he seemed not different than any other commoner from Rai he ran into today, as far from their future King as possible. So different to the clean, perfect princely image he presented just yesterday, this Prince Seokjin was a man Hoseok would talk to about taxes or the weather, or whatever it was adults pretending to not be rich beyond comprehension talk about.

“How is that possible? Rai is the perfect city of a perfect kingdom. Where does all your wealth go?”, he asked.

Hesitant, Prince Seokjin waved him over towards the entrance, holding his arm out as if to catch him if he reveals too much of them to the outside. Hoseok peaked out, a glimpse of the city border and the massive stones of the wall beyond them, illuminated by the settling sun. Behind him, the Prince kept close and leaned over him. His body was warm and the grip around Hosoek’s shoulders strong, but the words that he whispered into his ear were detached from life, cold and harsh.

“The money goes for that. Father will keep trying to build an impenetrable city, even if it kills him and everyone in it.”

* * *

Jin always hated the dark. Not only the absence of light, but also the dreary presence of the forged sunlight of Rai’s cave system which served as the center of the Earth Kingdom. His ancestors chose practicality over spending money and it worked out, for the most part. But since he was the only heir, he wasn’t allowed to leave the caves by himself, and even if escorted by guards he had to keep a hood over his head, as to avoid getting recognized. Or, as it turned out, even memorized.

Life in the caves of the Endless Mountain was reserved for the glory of the Earth Court and Jin grew up thinking there is nothing but riches beyond too. He played in the royal garden, oblivious to the fact that gardens weren’t supposed to be hidden in caves and dungeons, illuminated by light long enough to die and rot in that sweet plant smell of decay.

Then, he sought out the light by moving a secret block of stone away from his chambers, so he could observe his people beyond the Royal Hundred guards, the Court and the royals. It was his window, a secret he never showed anyone but Jungkook, a little disobedience against his parents he did just to see if he could satisfy his curiosity.

And what he saw, what he was not supposed to see, was horrific. Bathed in sunlight, as natural as it comes, outside there were people poor and starved and beggars and soldiers kicking the weak out of the way. It was not how the Crown Prince Seokjin was trained to see his Kingdom, but it was exactly as a commoner would see it, and for the first time in his life, Jin doubted is he fit to try and rule the people he knew nothing about.

When it all went better, when Jungkook was around, he would sneak him out, finding pipes and exits no human knew of to smuggle Jin out and into the city of people he was to rule over, but who didn’t know his face or him at all.

Then, Jungkook left, and alongside a broken heart, Jin had to learn the shadowy life patterns all over again. It was a game, a tragedy of sorts, that he missed sunlight and fresh air as much as he missed Jungkook.

After the royals and their lesser children started arriving to the Eternal City, his protection detail thinned out, and it occurred to him that he could slip out and run away all on his own. Having the idea was one thing, but actually doing it was a completely different matter. It took him two weeks of almost courageous moments to finally do it. It was the first time in his life he was walking anywhere alone, ignored, forgotten.

And he loved it. Nobody moved out of his way and children slammed into him running, their muddy hands staining his clothes and yet, at the end of it, he only looked like he belonged to the outskirts of Rai, torn and rugged but illuminated by sunlight of a dying day. It was a thrill like no other, perhaps additionally so because he did it all on his own. Jungkook thought him that at least, not to count on people, even if they were no servants and felt duty-bound to respect him. Out here, he was just another man, a commoner, and ever worse still, there was nobody waiting at him in a dark corner of a small house, not to bathe or eat or sleep with them. He was alone and still alive and nobody cared that he couldn’t stand the caves and the garden or the zoo for the royals anymore. Granted, nobody cared about him or if he lived or died either, but Jin now thought that sentiment is, somewhere deep down, already a part of his palace life too.

Bathed in the sunset red, that first time he ran off, he noticed too late that someone was on his trail. A boy, now a young man that used to study under the head architect of Rai recognized him. Having been trapped by boredom of endless meetings and celebrations years before, they played and chased each other around, a long time ago.

“Your face didn’t change at all Your Highness.”, Changkyun said, bowing and smiling up at him like it amused him to see the Crown Prince caught out like a petulant child. He was younger than Jin, but already a working man, moved up the ladder of Rai to build their magnificent outer wall.

Gasping for air and excuses like a fish, Jin was lost. He didn’t think it possible that anyone would recognize him this far out. When he asked about it, directing his face back under the large beige hood, Changkyun laughed.

“I _did_ see you before on these evening walks though. You were just trailed by that muscle bunny of a servant that looks like he would crack my skull if I came to ask what were you doing out.”

It would be a bit too much on Jin’s tender memory of Jungkook yet to remember how protective he was, when he didn’t know why.

Changkyun didn’t leave him to walk back to the palace by himself that first night. Or any other after that, when he would inevitably catch a stranger in baggy gray robes sneaking around his wall.

“It is my baby, at least this part. And when those idiots your father hires as supposed architects get their wall parts knocked down, this will be the last part standing.”, Changkyun said on one of their walks and Jin looked at him in wonder. The Wall was a permanent part of court life for so long that he sometimes forgot majority of the court never even saw it, hiding in the luxury of the caves like determined, lazy, bleached out spiders.

“You don’t have a big part under your responsibility though. If they attack and breach the wall, this part of yours will not protect Rai. Maybe part of the outskirts, yes, but all the seven cave palaces will be lost anyway.”, he said, slumping his shoulder lower when a woman passing them by exposed her legs to them, as if placing a piece of costly meat on the dinner platter. Changkyun didn’t notice, not even a glance her way, and Jin stared at her like she lured him in. She herself didn’t. Her daring nature, the freedom, the challenge in her eyes when she looked at him, it was seductive in a way that made Jin’s teeth clench and crotch hurt. Exotic and foreign to him, she might have just been hunting for her dinner and he looked like a giant bag of golden coins, but within that sunset, she seemed as unreachable as the stars to him. She could _be_ and love and run away, if she wanted to, and he envied that.

“You are a fool, my Prince. They want to eat and sleep and survive. Nothing much of freedom beyond running after the bottom of your own stomach in these outskirts.”, Changkyun told him when he voiced his thoughts.

“And remember this, if you do anything from these useless walks you make for me to follow you around on, if only to save you from getting killed for a few coins out here. It is only a matter of time before the war happens. When it does, the Wall will challenge the fucking Fire Lords like nothing else. It is magnificent, the biggest thing humans ever built with their own hands. And, more importantly, it is completely useless. Your Father doesn’t know it, because he doesn’t come down here to see it, but the Wall, except my part, is built of compact sand. It doesn’t burn, but if it gets wet… It will all go down like a stack of cards, and the people last to survive will be the poorest outskirts they gave their orphan, poor architect to build for. Poetic justice of the unfortunate commoners if you will.”

There was something black in Changkyun, darker and more solid than it could’ve ever grown in Jin, an intimate understanding of being born with the cards stacked against you. On any other day, it would be a demon Jin would try to understand and help, but something tickled his own mind.

“How would it ever get wet? The Fire people control only fire. That is all we need protection from.”, Jin said, assured of lessons he had to sit through since he was a child.

Changkyun looked at him with a mixture of admiration and pity, almost as if Jin himself was a wall of sand, with no support but his own delusions.

“Why do you think your father is gathering the royals Prince Seokjin? It occurred to him too late that, outside of the caves, people have allies. Fire can't burn the wall, but water and air can destroy it. Friends of these foreign kinds are what your own father wants now.”

Jin knew what that particular decision of the King was about, of course, so he didn’t mention to Changkyun that father’s way of making friends started with taking their children as hostages.

Now, it was weeks later and Chankgyun didn’t show up to walk with him for days already and the Wall portion he used to oversee was under a different man. But Jin didn’t have much time to dwell on that.

Prince Hoseok arrived to Rai and suddenly all eyes were on him. It seemed ridiculous to Jin that this foreign kingdom thought clever to answer to his father’s whims by actually sending someone of importance to their royal life, but it was obvious this was a win for the Earth Kingdom. East Fire was an ally, a devoted one at that, or they would do anything in their power to make it seems so.

But the Prince they sent was fire bottled into the searing yellow of sunlight, Jin thought so as soon as he saw him. Later, when he followed the foolish Prince Hoseok out into the outskirts and ended up hiding in a a dark, cold place with him, Jin realized why. Straight from his palms came out actual sunlight, no dangerous flames or pretense warmth and it was obvious why they sent this particular jewel to sit out a war hidden in the caves. You don’t send warriors to illuminate enemies into terror. When the fight and the filth of it comes, you hide them, somewhere far enough where the true dark can never touch them.

“I apologize if it scares you. There is nothing that can hurt you, I just… I don’t like the dark.”, Hoseok said, voice like wind chimes in a still winter night and Jin felt his heart plummeting through his own torso.

_Not again_, he thought, terrified of his own tendency to burn out for dangerously lovely people, the kind that could only be loved properly with a brave heart and honest mind, and Jin lacked both, despite his yearning to cleanse himself from the brand of the future King. And when they realized the truth of the gaping hole in Jin’s soul, there where all the royal, mighty magnificence should be, and instead which harbored only fears and failures, they inevitably ran after a proper purpose.

“I doesn’t scare me. I just didn’t expect you to be so… gifted in something that can’t kill.”, Jin said.

Hoseok lifted a perfect eyebrow at him and suddenly his perfect face was a stone-prefect sculpture of cold judgment. The change itself gave Jin whiplash.

“People kill. And if they want it so, anything can kill for them.”

Confused, Jin turned away. There was silence between them then, a distance that seemed insurmountable and Jin yearned to cross it nevertheless.

They walked back to the royal caves in complete darkness a few hours later, still not speaking. It was tense and obviously unfamiliar for both of them to stay silent for so long, but politics dictated it so.

“I don’t know how to get back in without alarming the guards.”, Hoseok finally broke it, and the sound shattered alongside the silence, like he made a decision to steer away from discussing anything actually important.

“I do, don’t worry. You can trust me.”, Jin said, pointing at the side wall of the big cave in front of them, where he hid a rope to climb to the second level with.

Hoseok looked at him like he wonders it that is actually true and then nodded. Jin felt like he passed some sort of test.

“I’ll go first, in case there is anyone in the hallway. It is just a straight climb up and then then some crawling in a smaller cave and you will be there.”

“You do this often?”, Hoseok said, pulling on the rope like it gave him new trust issues.

Jin nodded his head.

“And why does the future King sneak away from the palace like a criminal?”

Jin chuckled at that. There was nothing to do but shrug. He could have lied and said he wanted to connect to his people, but the truth was that he didn’t have people. None of the commoners outside of the palace cared who he was or what kind of a King he will be. For them, his life was just a fact, like a thunderstorm or a useless, boring rainfall that lasts for days. He might affect their lives, but their minds and hearts didn’t care how. Life carried bigger problems than a royal overlord that couldn’t be further from a myth, as hidden behind the cave walls as he was.

“Is it the Wall? Do you go out to see this giant monstrosity that will defend your throne one day?”, Hoseok continued, a hint of something condescending and angry in his tone, which he barely kept leashed from becoming a full rant about some personal problems.

“No. And it will not defend a throne, if you are counting on that. Possibly it will save some royal lives if they manage to run through the caves. Isn’t that what your parents sent you here for? To not die?”, Jin answered back, a fight of some hidden demons on both of their tongues.

Hoseok laughed.

“No Prince Seokjin. They sent me here to make sure I die usefully, I think.”

Jin turned away from him and climbed the rope with a brisk resolve of forgetting everything about pretty, foolish, cursed men that crossed his path and made him want to drop whatever little he had figured out about himself and run away to find the interesting part.

Of course, as soon as put his foot on the carpet of the cave floor, there was a pair of teeth snipping at his legs and an angry pair of tiger eyes.

“Hey, hey… good girl...”, Jin tried, feeling ridiculous saying it, not expecting that such a distraction would ever work on a menace that Hoseok’s familiar was.

But surprisingly, she blinked her big, intelligent eyes at him and stretched, excited to look away from him and towards the shaking rope that signaled her human climbing up and starting to crawl towards her.

When Hoseok finally emerged, she ran at him and licked his entire face before he managed to put his legs out of the tiny cave opening.

“Shae for the love of everything, quite trying to drown me in your spit!”, Hoseok hissed at her and she moved obediently away. Her mouth looked like it is laughing, sharp teeth and all, looking at Jin like he is a conspirator in this joke they just played on Hoseok.

When he crawled out, Hoseok pulled the scarf around his face and grinned at Jin.

“She bites people sometimes. I am surprised she didn’t bite you. My Shae is quite dangerous.”

“Yeah well… dangerous ones usually like me.”, Jin shrugged.

Hoseok grinned again, almost in a challenge of a flirt.

“You should go to your rooms. Down a level and then follow the guards patrolling until you get to the throne room. Probably will have to bribe one of the guards to let you pass unnoticed though.”

“Bribe them with what?”, Hoseok asked, shock on his face and Jin almost laughed at the implication that he just told a Prince of the Great East Fire Kingdom to fuck a guard for a bribe.

“Coins you idiot! Tell me you didn’t go sneaking into the outskirts of Rai without coins!”

Hoseok lowered his face towards his neck, as if in shame. Jin honestly doubted Hoseok was capable of feeling ashamed.

“I gave it away. There were a lot of skinny, begging children.”, he mumbled and Jin felt the words punch him in the guts, somewhere where the feelings about Hoseok’s pretty face were.

Unable and unwilling to speak, just in case his stupid mouth would come up with something of the likes of a marriage proposal if he did, Jin shoved a hand into his own pocket and gave him coins.

Hoseok didn’t want to take them at first, not opening his fingers, so Jin grabbed his hand and wrestled one slender finger after another.

“Consider it a bribe from me to you.”, he said, battling a very rebellious pinky and pretending he wasn’t essentially holding Prince Hoseok’s hand.

“A bribe for what now?”

Licking his own lips, Jin stared resolutely down at the golden coins on fair skin and didn’t look up.

“For not getting out to the outskirts again to get yourself killed. And to go with me to the welcome ceremony tomorrow.”

Hoseok laughed and squeezed his hand back, after a moment of silence.

Until the next day, Jin wasn’t sure if they were on the same page. About the Wall, the war, the poor commoners or the rich royals, Shae the tiger or even holding hands. But especially about the ceremony, which was supposed to be a ball. Did they even dance in the East Fire Kingdom?

And then Hoseok walked into the court, glowing in pale skin and blood red robes, wrapped around his figure like sin, and Jin was definitely sure they were not on the same page, for the shameless Fire Prince obviously wanted to murder him.

He saw several royal heads turn in amazement after him, but Prince Hoseok was walking straight towards Jin, like in a romantic play about warrior kings and queens where the main hero marches up to their love interest and then the curtain drops so children can attend.

He almost opened his mouth to speak when Hoseok stopped in front of him, half afraid he will not manage at all, when he spotted movement from all sides simultaneously.

They were pretending to be servants of the court, but had skin that saw too much sun for the caves of Rai. Smooth and fluent like a single blade movement, they surrounded Prince Hoseok, all six of them. Somewhere at the edge of the courtroom there was a commotion and there was a big cat growling loudly, but this was a battle formation of the South Fire bastards, the most precise way to kill known to man, and fire was coming out of their outstretched hands, a searing hot Sword of Six Whips that would cut Hoseok into pieces. But they trapped Jin with him in the target formation, because they were just stupid enough to forget. He was the future King and trained in many ways of surviving that he would like to pretend he didn’t know.

“Get down!”, he shouted at Hoseok and knocked them both down to the ground, until the first of the six whips slammed into his back instead. He shouted in horror and slammed his hand against the stone under him, rising the blocks lighting fast to protect both himself and Hoseok.

It was not fast enough. The second whip landed upon him, still across his back, with Hoseok struggling under him to get free. Only his palms were exposed to the air and he was shouting something, but Jin couldn’t hear over the rush of blood in his ears and then there was a light, a searing, blinding front of force that threw people away from them.

Amazed, he looked at Hoseok, right where he was lying down on him, face to face and unwilling to turn and see how many of them died by his hand, the one Jin called not capable of killing just yesterday, when the pain kicked in. It was on his back, where he throw himself in the way, and it must have been a gaping wound, as the Sword of the Six Whips required precision of elite fighters to dismember their enemies in seconds, twist after twist, and anyone who stood in the way with them.

“Seokjin!”, someone was screaming, and Jin opened his mouth to yelp in pain and say that someone should take a look at his back to see if there is a severe injury.

But only blood poured out of his lips, horrifically straight over Hoseok’s pale, mortified skin and the last thing Jin saw before sinking into the light was the flinch and closed eyelids of a perfect face, painted red and blood dripping down his eyelashes.

_I would have hated the dark_, he thought, the light of a thousand suns exploding in front his eyes and then there was a, finally, comfortable silence.


	11. The Dawn Of Everything - The Obedience of Lovers

**2.3 Yoongi/Namjoon / The Obedience of Lovers**

They were lying in a muddy ditch, hiding from Ylorion’s Hunting Guard, when a carriage came by. It was a rattled, decomposing house on wheels that wanted to give out, with knitted covers over the tiny windows and a man sitting in the front that seemed as happy as his horses were to brave the Great Road in the rain season. Rain was a rare occurrence in the desert, but always with an overwhelming force of nature proving itself to locals.

The carriage stopped in front of them, obviously searching for a prize capture in the rain, the runaway Lord of Ylorion and the Abnormal Menace that kidnapped him. Yoongi had his arm across Namjoon’s shoulders and held him down, pressed into the mud and well hidden. His other hand was twitching, waiting to use his specific talents against the oncoming enemy.

Except this was no enemy of theirs, just a father driving his family towards Ylorion, searching for a snippet of a tiny treasure promised to the one who brought information, or better yet, the bratty child himself, back to Lord Mino’s hands.

It was a delusion to think Namjoon’s father would just let him go. He sent the Hunting Guard after him and promised the folk a lifetime of privilege for Namjoon, all under the clever disguise of a kidnapping by a servant that was in fact an Abnormal. Yoongi gritted his teeth when they heard the story, hidden behind travel cloaks and huddled like lovers in a tavern a few days back. For once, Mino’s convictions of people were right and there would be no end to pain and suffering if he ever got his hands on Yoongi. He had no proof that Yoongi was indeed an Abnormal, but… Namjoon said he didn’t need to see the future to know he must keep Yoongi far away from Ylorion, and never think of returning himself either. They sent Dusty and Grey away that same day, since the description of the fugitives clearly stated to look for a purple bear and a raven. As if there were swarms of those around, especially in company of each other. Grey circled high above them for a few days after that, too stubborn to let go, but eventually realized her human needed her to obey and stay at a safe distance until they had some cover.

A few days later, the rain started. It was going on for a few days now, but still not providing any protection against prying eyes in the wide open desert, especially close to the Great Road.

The man driving the carriage scanned over the trees slowly, not prepared to give up. Finally, the little window behind the knitted curtain opened and a woman pushed her head out to shout at her husband that they had to go or the children would catch a cold. He grunted something back and then turned to direct the horses, obviously not prepared to face the wrath of a worried mother.

Yoongi sank back into the mud when they finally left, arm curling tighter over Namjoon’s back, almost like he was reassuring himself.

Later that day, they abandoned the road for a short break, the shelter of distance and occasional bush enough to hide them. Namjoon walked slow and deliberate behind Yoongi, holding onto his hand like a child lost. Out here, the world beyond Ylorion seemed abandoned until someone was about to catch them, and it was too often that they went to sleep by fainting into it, quick to gain some strength so they could rest. Food was not difficult to find, but shelter was, following the Road but trying to stay off of it at the same time. Namjoon slept and dreamt of nothing, no visions or dreams of the future or past. There was just the Road and Yoongi. They held onto each other stronger and with more freedom than ever before, and it was obvious that any thought of love declarations lived a short life in both their heads. There was simply no need. They had a need for sleep, food and each other, and to get away from Ylorion. To wonder if they could ever be again as anything else but each other’s, that was out of the question.

He sat beneath a bush, combing through the wet and filthy strands of Namjoon’s hair and staring off into the distance.

The Hunting Guard nearly caught them two days ago while they were resting like this. Yoongi fell asleep in Namjoon’s lap and his head was dropping too. Quick as a nightmare, a vision of a rider appeared too close to them, just soon enough for Namjoon to crawl under a rock and pull Yoongi with him. The rider still came, following their muddy tracks with a terrifying precision. It didn’t matter that he was hunting after a human that could see him coming, that they kept watch and had precautions. Yoongi was about to fail at protecting, again, and the bitter taste of failure trickled down his throat with every panicked gulp of air he managed.

“Hey. As soon as he comes close enough, I will do it.”, Yoongi whispered, determined eyes and shaky hands. There were boulders around them, just big enough to be lifted and dropped, if one could. And Yoongi could. Certainly, he would, for getting caught meant death for him, and he refused to die.

Namjoon looked at him like he sees him for the first time, wonder and horror in his big, trusting eyes and Yoongi knew this is how he shows his true colors. He would kill to save himself, yes. And he would also kill to save Namjoon. Or at least he hoped so. Maybe that was enough.

The rider came close enough to spot their little hideout and Yonngi lifted a rock from the side towards him, hurling it through the air like it was a speck of dust. For a breathless moment, he thought he had him, but then he faltered, at the last moment. The rock flew by the man’s head and scared him right off of his horse. When he tumbled down to the mud and then covered his head in terror, the shout that was ripped out of his throat said enough. He was young, too young and too terrified to run or shout or call for help.

Namjoon grabbed Yoongi’s hand and the rock fell into the mud a few meters away from the young guard.

They looked at each other, familiar and yet foreign. But not scared. Never scared.

“We need to run. Leave him, take the horse and run.”, Namjoon said, crawling out from their hideout. Yoongi followed, too shocked by his own failing hands to do anything else. They gathered a stray bag and approached the horse and the man still didn’t raise his head to look at them. It was strange, enough that Yoongi believed he actually hit him already.

Namjoon helped him up on the horse and then climbed behind him, closing Yoongi’s trembling body in a strong embrace. Just before they took off, the man lifted himself up slightly, still looking at the ground, stiff back and shaky arms.

“I will not tell them I saw you. I swear it on my life.”, he said, a voice of a boy from a chest his mind still didn’t grow into.

Namjoon stiffened behind Yoongi and looked down.

“Why?”, he asked.

“Because I want to run away too.”

He stared at the bowed head, submission displayed as if the boy was a slave and he wanted so bad to order him to get up and run.

“What is your name soldier?”, Namjoon asked, voice hollow and steady, like a trained frequency of dominance.

“My name is Jooheon, Lord Namjoon.”, he boy said, not lifting his head and Namjoon inhaled sharply around Yoongi, as if hit by a whip.

“Run then, if that is what you want.”, Namjoon said and turned the horse away.

A second later, when they were galloping down the dry dirt of the dessert, Yoongi squeezed Namjoon’s hand.

“Why did you let him go? He will tell them where we went.”

Namjoon took a while to answer and what he voiced was:

“I am not a Lord Yoongi. I will never be a Lord.”, but what Yoongi heard was:

_I didn’t want to let you kill him._

It rang in Yoongi’s ears for a long time after that, alongside the steady sound of hooves on the mud. It stayed even now, when he was lying in Namjoon’s lap, pretending to sleep and tortured by what he did and didn’t do at the same time.

“Do you think I could’ve killed him?”

Namjoon jumped a bit, startled that Yoongi wasn’t asleep more than by anything else. He looked down into his eyes.

“I don’t know.”, he said, honest as usual.

Yoongi looked away, ashamed and relieved at the same time.

“Do you think I would’ve?”, he asked, going back to stroking Yoongi’s hair.

“No. You would never.”

There was silence between them then, almost long enough for the conversation to go forgotten behind mental doors that should never open.

“If I did hurt him… would you be scared of me?”, Yoongi finally asked, arriving at the point and looking anywhere but at Namjoon.

“No. Never. Don’t even...”, he rushed to answer, lifting Yoongi up by his legs and grabbing his shoulders.

Yoongi shrugged, sitting up and Namjoon lurched towards him, hands sliding over the tension in his neck to grab his face. The rain still wouldn’t let them go, not even for a bit, so they both could’ve been crying and wouldn’t even know they weren’t alone in the anguish. He pressed his face close to Yoongi’s and the water kept coming, from the skies and their skin and everywhere, constantly.

The air smelled like a bottom of a muddy lake and yet the desert seemed to explode in color around them.

“I am not a man worthy of you Yoongi. Never was. But you are here with me and I am too selfish to let go, even if you do.”

His voice didn’t tremble and hands remained steady on Yoongi’s cheeks, determined to be firm and say the right, the only important thing, as soon as possible, for that was often the only thing he knew how to do.

Yoongi looked up at him finally, mouth opening in shock and recognition of what he just heard. There were words, so many words that wanted out of him, denial and alarms going off in his head. But on the outside, nothing. Yoongi didn’t have sounds to wrap around the words of love declarations, literal or else, especially when they came in response to something he never thought he would hear.

“I will not leave, unless I die. And even then, I will try not to leave you.”, Namjoon continued and Yoongi’s entire body twitched, huddled closer and tried to find and exile space between them.

“No. No! You can’t die!”, he managed, shaking his head and pleading, grasping at Namjoon with all his might.

“I have no plans to, I promise. But, if it happens, I need you to know, I will never leave you willingly. As long as you want me, I will be right here.”

Yoongi stared at him in wonder, this man from another life that found him out of all orphaned children of Ylorion and then had the nerve to promise him forever. There were still words stuck in his throat, the “I love you’s” and the “Me too, you idiot” and a few “Always” in between. But none could go out, for Yoongi lived terrified between light and shadow like they could both kill him and that was that.

So he kissed him instead. Hot, wet and thirsty, he grabbed and consumed, until Namjoon trembled below him, planted in the mud but so undeniably beautiful, perfect and everlasting, a soul so important Yoongi knew now the answer to his own question. Definitely, he would kill to keep him alive. And he would fight to keep him his.

He was painfully hard in a minute of heat between them, rubbing against Namjoon’s hip and clawing at his sides like a bird of prey, and maybe he would have crossed the only line they had left between them right then and there, in the mud beneath a thorny bush somewhere south of Ylorion, left of the Great Road. But then Namjoon arched his back like that and threw his head back, moaning when Yoongi rubbed his knee in between his legs, and Yoongi swore he saw God or the angels sang or whatever the fuck was it that happened when life aligned in front of you so clear it smacked you over an unsuspecting (cock) head. Expanse of skin, from his neck down to that damn chest, soaked in dirt and rain and a thin, useless shirt, it was a religious experience. And Yoongi wouldn’t make love to an angel in the mud, no matter how much of a demon he saw himself as.

“We have to stop.”, he breathed into Namjoon’s neck, head dropping in defeat and he almost heard the mental slap that delivered to the man under him.

“I… I am sorry, I didn’t want to push...”, he started, all princely damn gallant and so impossibly hurt to be rejected that it gave Yoongi whiplash.

“No, I want to, of course I want to, but not… not here. Not here.”, he stuttered out, reaching for Namjoon’s skin like a starved man, shuffling close through a puddle.

“Right. Sorry. I didn’t… I haven’t never...”, Namjoon shrugged, not looking at him yet, a blush creeping up his cheeks, impossibly evident through the dirt and the crimson of arousal.

“I didn’t either. Not… not all of it at least.”, Yoongi said, a flash of previous lives in his minds, a touch here and a kiss there and faces that came and went, all with no names to them, except Kihyun. But then, when it came to these things, when did another orphan starved for a loving touch count at all.

Namjoon looked at him like he is judging if he can trust what he just heard or not, and possibly as if he already does and is just deciding will that trust ruin him or not.

“Ok.”, he said finally, still breathing close to Yoongi’s neck.

“I want to. I want you.”, Yoongi repeated out loud, as if his still hard cock against Namjoon’s thigh wasn’t enough of a clue.

The other man laughed, rising his eyebrows and looking down like it is obvious and Yoongi grinned, shameless, proud to see a bit of smug, confident Namjoon, with no doubt in himself.

He was surprised by lips on his and a sweet, cunning smile against his cheek the next second.

“Somewhere else then.”, Namjoon whispered across to his ear, thrusting up to prove his point and Yoongi moaned like it was the first time anyone ever came close to his dick. Maybe it was, or at least the first person that mattered anyway.

“Somewhere good.”, he responded back and giggled when Namjoon hugged him, warm and precious in all that dirt, like it was perfect and enough and forever already.

* * *

The desert broke into patches of greenery and dusted muddy meadows a few days later, far down south as the horse they took from the soldier could carry them. They sent it away to lead the tracks a different direction once they didn’t need it anymore, hidden by trees and bushes as they were. Namjoon could get Dusty to follow at a closer distance, even dared to let him sleep close by. Yoongi smiled more often, a faraway look about him, like he remembers the road neither of them ever traveled on before.

It’s what got them, in the end of one of the calm, unsuspecting days, miles away from Ylorion. Whenever Namjoon would let his guard down, when he stopped looking ahead to predict and avoid, life would happen in that bad, unfortunate way it seemed to enjoy to and remind him he can never relax, not for a second. If he did, a fog of something dark and hopeless would engulf him and the way he saw ahead of the world would blank up with some fears, terrors rising from deep within him, and he would be completely useless. He hated feeling powerless, but it was nothing compared to the wide agony of being run over by cold waters from the depths of himself, slow and familiar but inevitable, putting him back into the known darkness of not being prepared or ready or alive at all. Yoongi couldn’t have seen it, because Namjoon hid the weakness of his mind like the most precious mystery ever known, a gambit to undo him. Dusty knew, but he was a bear and in that way removed from any reaction times required to prevent the slip up.

He should have recognized it himself, stopped it on time, but life of a wanderer beyond Ylorion was strange and exciting enough to make him forget, at least for a while.

First, he stared at the trees cropping up in the desert sometimes, entrapped by their colors and ways, so much so that hours could pass in their silent walking before he would remember Yoongi is holding him by the hand and he is not alone at the end of the universe here.

Then, memories old and nostalgic came to him, of nanny Isolda and stories she told him, of the Druids and magic and all things alive and good in the world, before Lords of Ylorion.

He remembered a tree that used to stand in the middle of the city. It was an oak, ancient and partly petrified, but magnificent in roots that cracked the concrete and present, a fact of life so old even Suho forgot to find it unusual enough to remove it. And it dressed up the most magnificent green each spring, broad and wide as it was. Isolda thought him that they called it the First Tree, because it was there before Ylorion had a single stone set in its own roots. Namjoon admired it with a reverence of a child discovering it is capable of breathing without thinking about it and he ran to spend time under it most of his afternoons.  
Reminded of it by these resilient, crippled desert trees which they saw on their journey, foreshadowing the Forest of the Earth they were coming close to, he mentioned it to Yoongi.

“Yes, I remember that tree. I hated that fucking thing.”, he said and Namjoon gaped at him like a fish.

“What? Why would you ever hate a tree?”

Yoongi looked somewhere behind him, where memories of his own stood, cemented in the gray of Ylorion.

“My mother loved that tree. She went to touch it at least once every few days, never stopped talking about the Druids and their magic and all the other shit it signified to people. And then, one day, it was removed and cut out overnight. She went to see it and there was only a giant hole in the courtyard where it used to be. Came back to our hideout in tears, sobbing for the entire night. I don’t think I ever saw he cry before that. She pretended that she wasn’t crying when they took my brother before. But for this fucking tree… she just couldn’t stop. A few days later, she got sick. And there was no more mum either.”

Namjoon dropped Yoongi’s hand like it burned him as soon as he realized where the story would go, horrified and guilty and unprepared for the magnitude of his own feelings. He could have known, could have seen, could have kept quiet about the entire thing, if he only looked. But on that day, he didn’t, and Yoongi told him a truth he couldn’t stomach.

Grey landed on a branch a few meters away from Namjoon, staring at him with eyes as dark as midnight and it took hours, what felt like days after Yoongi stopped talking and kept walking, a distant shadow of his own demons, for the truth to come bubbling up Namjoon’s throat. It burnt like acid, a fire untamed by his Sight, and even the strength of the scratchy words he wasn’t able to predict.

“I killed the tree you know. And, ultimately, your mother too, I guess.”

Yoongi turned around to look at him with anger of the skies across his face. Both of his fists were trembling.

“What the fuck are you talking about Namjoon?”

He shrugged, looking away.

“I used to run away from duties to see the First Tree. One day, Mino decided I crossed the line. He killed Isolda before that, so there was nobody to cover for me. For me, the tree was a distraction. For him, it was a reminder I needed to obey.”

He didn’t look up, so he couldn’t see Yoongi marching towards him, slamming his slight body against Namjoon’s and pushing him back.

“You fucking idiot.”

“I am sorry, I ...”

Again, Yoongi slammed himself into him again, pushing him further.

“Namjoon, look at me!”

When he did, Yoongi was furious, fists fully clenched and hot, searing rage coloring his eyes.

“_You_ didn’t kill the tree, Mino did. And my mother died because of the things_ your father_ did, sure, but you don’t get to slap it on your own soul because it’s easier to hate yourself than your own father!”

Namjoon looked at him, lungs squeezed out of breath and no words crawling up his throat at all.

“Are you hearing what I’m saying?!”, Yoongi shouted at him.

Namjoon nodded, afraid of other words that Yoongi might say.

“If you are, then you hear me clearly when I tell you. Your father fucked a lot of people up. But he fucked _you_ up first. And none of those fuck ups do you get to take over and carry on your shoulders like a born moron, because they aren’t yours to pay for!”

Namjoon nodded again, but out of habit, since this was a mantra Yoongi repeated around him a lot, whenever the darkness would descend on Namjoon and he stopped making sense. He didn’t understand it, why Yoongi tried or how he ever found these words to shout at him, from which truth wells he picked them up and staged them so twisted, yet true, confusingly obvious and yet forever escaping that “click” of acceptance in Namjoon’s brain.

“I am not helping you like this, am I?”, Yoongi said, looking away and biting his lip in frustration.

Namjoon hunched his shoulders together, trying to grow smaller, less of a burden, lovelier, less scared, easier to know and more natural to love. As usual, he failed. As always, he failed to predict the next step to take, for the darkness descended upon him already, and the next step was, of course, just shit life threw at you.

“I don’t need your help Yoongi. Just… help me make it right.”

“That is the problem you idiot. It isn’t yours to correct.”

This should’ve been the end of this particular oversight of his senses, a reprieve in looking ahead he allowed and paid for and he should’ve snapped out of it and started doing his job, but…

The trees were still there. And Yoongi’s voice kept echoing around his head, words out of sequence but ripe in meaning and Namjoon kept his brain running on empty, just to forget, to tire it out, to breathe until tomorrow.

That is how it got them. He was too busy licking these self-inflicted wounds and he didn’t see and then the Lord’s Guards were upon them.

It didn’t seem logical that they would follow them that far out of Ylorion, so far south where they wouldn’t be reachable to Ylorion’s need in a few hours. But it seemed Lord Mino despised losing control over Namjoon more than he minded not having a hew dozen of his soldiers around.

In seconds, swords were upon them and Yoongi lifted half the forest floor up to fight them. There were disorganized shouts and few well aimed strikes at both of them, but none of them reached skin. Namjoon snapped into moving a second faster than he should be able to in a second, and Yoongi mowed down soldiers in all directions around them.

Back to back with Namjoon, he grabbed him with one hand and swung at the soldiers with the other. Trees, soil, sand and rock flew around in a frenzy and they were all shouting, bodies slamming against each other.

He took them down, enough of them it seemed, and Namjoon saw Dusty charging at a few turned backs from a distance, purple glimpse of dangerous rage. Even Grey descended on a head or a two, talons and beak busy with flesh exposed underneath the helmet.

He ducked down from a sword aimed at his head and the soldier who swung at him made a grimace when another weapon pierced through his chest. Namjoon thought it is Yoongi taking ownership of someone’s sword, but the piece of metal was in a steady grip of another soldier, hidden by a helmet and resolutely aiming away from their targets.

“Watch out!”, Yoongi shouted and swung a tree trunk on its axis above Namjoon’s head, knocking out a mace of something sharp and deadly.

A second away, Namjoon saw the sword coming, out from the other side nobody looked at, a piercing surprise aimed at Yoongi’s chest, still distracted by defending Namjoon and then he would yelp, red seeping through his shirt and around the metal instantaneously, straight through the heart. A second was enough for Namjoon to react though, a step away from where he would otherwise stand, just quick enough to offer his own chest to the sword instead.

The world went went quiet a moment after, pain numbing him in waves, from the shoulder towards everywhere else.  
Yoongi was grasping his face, then the sword and then his bleeding flesh, panic and tears on his face, but no sound was coming down through to Namjoon. The soldier who killed another one a minute ago to protect them was there too, kneeling in front of Namjoon and borrowing his own hands to press, to hold his blood in. His helmet got knocked back and it was the man, the boy with a horse from a few days ago, terrified and shouting something at Namjoon, at Yoongi, at anyone that could apparently hear him.

Namjoon couldn’t, and the shadows of dark, menacing things closed on him really fast then, like they realized all of his defenses are gone.

Later, days later, he woke up to a starry sky and tree branches, illuminated by a bonfire. It crackled like fire does, loud and awake in the middle of the night, and he could smell the wet, morphing tree that smoked next to him. Also, something medicinal, a plant-sharp smell of a salve or a bandage. The night was cold and his nose was freezing, but his body was pressed against purple, warm fur of the never-straying bear, illuminated by the fire when he looked down at Namjoon, eyes joyful and tongue dripping spit all over Namjoon’s face.

Feeling like he forgot he has a body and now has to learn how to use it again, agonizingly slow, he lifted his head and looked further around.

Lying on a spread of leaves next to him was Yoongi, a pale hand intertwined with Namjoon’s numb fingers. He was sleeping, brow furrowed like he is going through a nightmare. Namjoon moved his fingers to squeeze his, as if to calm him down, and Yoongi shuffled closer at that, not waking up but calming his choppy breath.

Further away, on the other side of the fire, against the massive tree trunk whose branches Namjoon saw as soon as he woke up, sat a man, tall, slender figure, with a shock of ocean blue hair on top of his head. He was also sleeping, wrapped around a massive, snoring beast. It seemed to be something smaller than Dusty, but with more fangs and a sharper head.

It opened its eyes, sudden and scary, looking straight at Namjoon, like it could sense him watching. The eyes were huge and shiny, kind and curious, but somehow more sentient than any other animal, directly staring through Namjoon’s foggy brain. It was a wolf, or something pretending to be a wolf at least, and it seemed to approve of Namjoon coming back to the land of the living.

Finally, leaning against the tree, looking away from all of them, into the forest, as if on a watch, perfectly illuminated by the fire, stood the boy soldier of Ylorion.

He didn’t spot Namjoon at first, stoic and weary of enemies as he seemed, but then the rustle the wolf made startled him to turn. He noticed Namjoon being awake immediately, mouth agape for a second, and then he did a thing Namjoon never thought he would see anyone do towards him.

The Salute to the Lord of Ylorion was a simple, distinctive bow of the head and shoulders, kept rigid and firm in submission, willingly given and carefully taken. It was a salute given to the Lords of old times, before Suho and his tainted offspring. And, what was the more terrifying part, when given by a soldier, it was a promise of readiness to lay their life on the line for their Lord.


	12. The Dawn Of Everything - I See You

**2.4 Jungkook/Taehyung / I See You**

The Great Forest was silent and loud at the same time. Jungkook spent a lot of his nights as a wolf, shaped to hide and blend in with the deep nature far away from the roads and settlements. Here, in the wilderness ruled by bark older than all the Kingdoms of men, was perhaps the last place in the whole world where a runaway could stay undetected. The Druids told told him that it was one of the last few magical places left in the world. It certainly looked made of stardust, especially in the night, ruled by glimmering starlight and glowing creatures. It could deceive the mind, convince it of sounds and dangers, or make it not notice them until it was too late. The Druids also told him he can only live in it if the Forest allows so, and that it would know why he entered it in the first place.

Sentient or not, everything old shined with a comforting, sleepy purple in the night and it was often too beautiful to believe in come morning.

If he heard the sound that would change his life during the day, it would probably blend in with the common noise. But in this forest the dark was sacred and when a distant cry of something pierced through it with finality of shattered glass, it stopped the breath in Jungkook’s wolf lungs. He was running towards it before thoughts formed in his mind and it still seemed like an eternity before he reached a stream of a small river and found the source of what he now recognized to be crying. There was someone there, bared shoulders glistening in the moonlight as they bent over the water and Jungkook stupidly ran straight towards them. The surprised shout was followed by a kick of water in Jungkook’s direction and the person was gone the next second, almost too fast to be followed by human eyes. But Jungkook didn’t have human eyes in that moment, so when the man rose through the air like a bird and landed on a tree branch too high out of reach, he still followed and came closer. The darkness was more a liquid, heavy light in the Forest anyway, so he could see the shape of him, a lean, trembling body up in the leaves, even when he shifted to a human. It could have been stupid to expose himself, but this was after loneliness of his self-exile struck the cords of horror in his mind, of how he would die alone and nobody would even care to wonder how.

“I am not going to hurt you. I promise.”, he said, unused voice scratchy and strange, but still his. The man didn’t answer, holding onto the tree with a strong grip and Jungkook recalled the strange smell he noticed in wolf form and never got to process. _Blood._

“I know you are hurt. I can help.”, he tried again.

When he remembered that night later on it seemed obvious that he would instinctively recognize the ability of flight from the ground and up, so impossible for most humans. But Jungkook saw it before, the ready reaction and quick escape, every time his brother approached Jihyon while trying to startle her. Jeongon was a cruel husband and she was a bird determined to never be caught, unless on her terms. It seemed natural to her body and mind to behave like that was a basic right assigned to her and she carried it with startling grace and beauty. Jungkook used to think she was the most beautiful human he ever saw.

Until that night.

The man finally dropped down from the branch, still shaking but graceful in landing in front of Jungkook, distrustful stance but fully illuminated by stray moonlight and Jungkook’s entire mind just… stopped. He was ethereal, a spell of dark, glistening eyes staring at him from behind the strands of hair that reflected every glimmer of purple around them. But he was hurt and the smell of blood was obvious now when they were close, even to a human nose. Jungkook kept both of his hands up and tried to approach him and help with a wound on his arm, trickling a slow ebb of liquid out, but the man stepped back.

“You were a wolf.”, he said and his voice was deep and soothing, not displaying any panic.

“Yes. Can I help you?”, Jungkook pointed at his arm.

The man seized him up, making Jungkook very aware that he stood there naked and probably dirty from the run.

“I don’t need help.”

And he went back towards the water, never turning his back on Jungkook, eyes snapping to him every second to check that he isn’t about to be attacked.

There was no chance in hell that Jungkook would have walked away now, even if the man kept looking at him like he is the most dangerous creature alive. Finally, being treated like that was not anything new.

“My name is Jungkook.”, he tried again, squatting over the river bank at a safe distance.  
It was several moments later, when Jungkook didn’t expect it at all, that the man straightened up from cleaning his wound and answered him.

“Taehyung.”

The loud silence of the Great Forest stretched between them for some time, while Taehyung sat on the bank and started draining his clothes.

“Who hurt you?”, Jungkook asked, trying not to stare at the way the soaked fabric clung to Taehyung’s chest.

“Does it matter?”, Taehyung said, looking away for a brief moment, in the direction from which he came.  
“It matters if someone is still on your trail. I can help with hiding you.”

Taehyung looked back at him, judging stare and a curious head tilt cementing Jungkook’s growing problem with not being able to look away, if even for a second.

“I took care of it. And nobody could follow me by air.”

Jungkook nodded, backing off from the topic.

“You are a Wind Lord.”

Taehyung chuckled but his lips never lifted to a smile, not even a sad one.  
“Yes. And you are a shifter.”

Jungkook nodded and that was that.

It seemed fitting that they would not stray far from each other in the following days, stranded in the forest as they were. Jungkook wanted to ask why was a Wind Lord hiding in the Great Forest and did he want to leave and towards what (or who) and many, all the other things swirling in his head. It was a common pattern of Jungkook’s behavior. Jin asked him a few times to just sit and count his own breaths until the nagging and blabbing stopped, eventually. It worked, so Jungkook applied it. He was damaged in the social skill of talking to people and expecting them not to want to rip his throat out or fearing he might do it to them. Jin had patience and understanding for that, even if he didn’t know why. Watching Taehyung sleep for those few hours he managed to catch to transform, from a distance but never absentminded, Jungkook wondered would he leave this angel life threw at him too. Would he have to? Could Jiho even reach him here, deeply immersed in a place that skipped the time of human wars and insane fathers that planned conquests? And if he could reach him, would Jungkook have time to run away before they turned him into a monster he was born to be, for any side of the conflict?

But, mostly, if he managed to run, would he run alone again?

He sat and thought and then sometimes he would ask questions and then Taehyung would. Time forgot about them and they forgot about time. That is how the thread of their lives rolled out, evidently crossed before they ever saw each other.

Taehyung asked him how he knew of Wind Lords this far away from their realm and Jungkook told him the story of a princess that came to his land to marry a monster.

“What is her name?”, he asked again, drawing a pair of wings in the dirt with a pine branch. They were wide and spread out, ready to leave.

_Please don’t_, Jungkook wanted to say, but what he said instead was: “Jihyon, the Wind Princess.”

Taehyung looked up and into his eyes, and Jungkook knew it before he said it.

“That is my sister.”

His voice was shaking now, lost in memories and absent for the realization on Jungkook’s face.

_Of course you are a Prince, of course you are her brother._

He wanted to say ridiculous things to fix the moment that seemed dangerously close to shattering in front of him.

_You must be the angel that I caught the glimpse of in her, all those years ago. _

_I will never leave you or let them hurt you, like I had to watch him do to her. _

_I am sorry, for being of that blood and knowing my blood hurt yours, before I even found you. But I did now and I don’t want to leave you. I don’t think I would even know how._

But he kept his mouth shut, obviously, like he did when the love he felt for Jin came up his throat to choke him into admitting it. Princes didn’t love monsters, no matter the Kingdom.

“Well, the idiot she came to marry is my brother.”, he said in the end and Taehyung’s mouth opened in shock.

“Jeongon?! You are a Prince?”

And Jungkook laughed, bitter and small, cursed by his own blood.

“I am a failure. An exiled one.”

He saw the recognition of anguish flash on Taehyung’s face, something of a cursed, not-being-enough king and it was foreign, utterly wrong for the Wind Prince to know how that feels. He wanted to address it, but ultimately didn’t know how.

“Well, I pushed your brother off a flying mountain cliff once. And then my familiar nearly swallowed him.”, Taehyung said, a hint of pride in his voice and Jungkook blinked at him, laughter bubbling up and trampling both sorrow and fear to run out of his mouth.

“You what?!”, he heard himself say, joy painting his voice and Taehyung smiled, the first proper smile that Jungkook saw on his face. His lips stretched in a wide, beautiful square that swallowed his entire face somehow and Jungkook’s laughter and words dried up and adoration crawled back up from his chest to cut his breath again.

Then, he asked Taehyung about his familiar and the man laughed more, excited to say how she was “the best girl” and “he misses he so much”. He never told him what Tiny actually was, just that he left her in the ocean and would like to see her soon, but they parted ways because Taehyung knew he was being tracked by someone and thought it smarter to travel closer to the forest and not draw attention to himself by flying to the coast regularly.

“Where were you going?”, Jungkook asked and Taehyung dropped that truth on him like a cold downpour.

“Rai, in the Earth Kingdom. I guess they are still waiting for me to arrive.”, Taehyung answered and Jungkook’s heart sank.

He could have tried explaining that it was not safe to go, that there was a war coming that way, and who would fight in that war, but that obviously meant interrupting this reprieve he had, that they maybe both liked. Taehyung would leave, and soon, of that he was aware now. And Jungkook was scared of realizing how he wouldn’t let him go alone, even if keeping his distance. Maybe he would be an additional danger, a heavy weight to carry right into war and peril, but he still couldn’t imagine, no matter how much he tried, seeing Taehyung’s back walking away from him.

_I know what I will choose. Just… not today. Please, please, not today…_

He repeated a mantra in his head and time flew over them, gentle like a stream of water.

Then, he offered to go and visit Tiny for him, since he could travel in wolf form faster than Taehyung could. It was surprising to have Taehyung accept it, making Jungkook promise to check on her and not alarm her.

“I can hear her being sad and hurt and worried and a thousand other things and I need a pair of eyes on her. Even for just a bit. But just… be safe, yeah? Only go if you are sure nobody will notice you.”

So Jungkook went and imagine his surprise when, after two days of traveling south of the Great Forest he entered the water in a small, hidden bay and barely had time to turn into a shark before a fucking orca appeared out of nowhere and scared him half to death. He was certain she did whatever orcas did to imply they are laughing at people (or sharks in this case). It was short and utterly mortifying, for the bloody animal had a link with Taehyung’s brain and personality too it seemed, all too happy to greet and tease him at the same time. Jungkook swore at Taehyung for not warning him when he arrived back to the forest and climbed up to the two hammocks they set up in the foliage.

Still, Taehyung laughing was worth the scare and the humiliation.

A day later, Taehyung showed him another, bigger hammock of freshly woven leaves that he made in gratitude (and boredom) while Jungkook was away.

“I guess that is enough of an apology for making your deadly companion nearly kill me.”, he shrugged.

“Oh come on. Tiny likes you and she is harmless anyway. Not even Jimin is scared of her.”

Jungkook looked at him and tilted his head in question, expecting another anecdote of introduction about someone from Taehyung’s family or city.

His mistake was evident the moment Taehyung’s grin dropped, just a tiny bit and a hand clapping Jungkook on the back slipped away to the safety of his lap.

_Oh_, Jungkook thought. _Of course._

“Jimin is my… my soulmate.”, he said, almost as if he is saying it for the first time in his life and Jungkook wondered a thousand things at once again, all of them painful.

“He is the prince of the Water Kingdom but the ocean scares him, so Tiny carries him on her back whenever he wants.”, Taehyung explained further and looked further away from Jungkook, almost like he can see someone, that particular someone. Maybe, if he looked hard enough, Jungkook could see this Jimin too, somewhere in Taehyung’s eyes and the wild jealousy that bloomed through Jungkook’s chest would ebb away, just a bit.

“That must be a sight to see. Why isn’t Jimin with you?”, he finally asked, snapping Taehyung away from the ghost of someone who was not Jungkook in_ their_ forest.

“It wasn’t safe. And his parents would never send him anywhere with me. I am the irrelevant Prince you see, so definitely not a recommended catch for the only royal child of the Water Kingdom.”

_You are relevant to me. Royal or not, you are so important,_ he wanted to say, but if he could keep the love at bay, jealousy was to stay silent too. And besides, Taehyung spoke with a voice of someone who cares so much about this Jimin, even if he let time pass in a bubble of magic right alongside Jungkook.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. He is waiting for me and I will go back as soon as the visit to Rai is done.”, Taehyung shrugged and Jungkook wanted to shout at him about a war and life and all the other bullshit that waited down the road, but, again, he kept quiet.

The realization that the time was up snapped around him like a hangman’s rope and the rush of decisions to be faced floored him.

_Of course, you have places to be and people to love after this nightmare is over,_ he thought.

It has to be today, he repeated to himself and then looked at Taehyung, aware he would rip their reprieve in the storm of time up with words made of sorrow and anger.

Nothing came out of his mouth. 

* * *

Taehyung didn’t live life in deadlines and rules, but one of the obvious ones, inherent to him and Jimin, was that they were singular in the way they loved each other. Never would he expect he would want to love someone else remotely close to that. And he still didn’t want to.

But Jungkook was made of blinding, ancient and golden magic, a puzzle wrapped in tortured fabric of flesh and he was addictive. Suddenly, it didn’t matter at all did Taehyung want it or not, the boy was just there, in his thoughts and dreams and he could see the silly little grin he greeted Taehyung with behind closed eyelids and hear the cadence of his breaths above all the other sounds of the Forest. He noticed his own fingers extended, yearning for lingering touches, and how he stopped manipulating winds around the Forest when Jungkook was a wolf, to not hinder the scented path he needed to take home.

And it was, maybe for the first time in Taehyung’s life, a _proper_ home. Not a person or a feeling, but a place, completed by Jungkook being there, a reach and a shout away, happiness and laughter and sometimes, only sometimes, a slip into darker shades of thought over Jungkook’s face. And Taehyung wanted to remove it and make it all bright, but Jungkook wasn’t the type of a person that one loved by building them illusions. Gorgeous and distant like a constellation, but tough as a diamond he was, unyielding and intoxicating, he was to be loved like a force of nature, accepting and close, in his rhythm and with no walls up. However it was, Taehyung started loving him inexplicably fast, like a magnet pulled up and towards, with no option but to go where the force took him.

So he stayed. Not because he planned to or needed to, his wounds healed and he felt certain he would know how to avoid future robbers on the Road again, he missed Tiny and thought of Jimin and his promise that he will be back as soon as he can and yet… The exiled Price kept him glued in place, ironically feeling more free and happy than ever, safe and sound and it was almost a fairytale.

But it wasn’t. Taehyung’s life was never a happy story, and even if it was, his happy ending was already somewhere else, signed in stone, no matter how Jungkook looked at him, with glistening globes that put the Great Forest on a starry night to shame and in the background.

He asked Jungkook about his past, after the boy went silent and pensive one afternoon, images obviously running in front of his eyes with the slow trickle of their sheltered time.

“What do you want to know? I ran away from what was home a long time ago. I guess I don’t have a family or anyone that would miss me.”, Jungkook said, looking at the ground in something akin to shame, as if Taehyung would ever blame him for every idiot that ever met him and didn’t love him instantly.

“Is that really true? Or do you tell yourself that so you don’t have to go back?”, he asked and Jungkook’s breath caught and stopped, with a cadence of trembling truths behind it.

“I am not… I had to leave.”, he finally said, resigned to what must have been true.

“I understand that. But is there really nobody you would go back for?”, Taehyung prodded further and Jungkook still wouldn’t look at him, like it physically hurts to be reminded. Maybe it did. Perhaps it should have hurt Taehyung too, to remember that they were both running away here, but he was too much of a masochist to stop. Pain is how you knew you were alive, when love and hope failed. Maybe, in both of their lives, they failed before they were born and now they just carried the carcasses of failures trapped in skin.

“I would go back to save them. To Uzam, for my people, your sister. To Rai, for Jin... If they needed me, I would. But they are safer without me.”, Jungkook said, and it was hours after that Taehyung realized there is a name somewhere in that confession that he recognized. The Earth Prince was called Jin. And maybe it was just a coincidence, but knowing how Jungkook existed, incapable of invisibility and magnetic for anything alive, it wouldn’t surprise him to find out Jungkook’s Jin was the Prince himself, the future King of their world, high up and untouchable, golden and revered. Somewhere too high up for Taehyung to compare too at least. He perceived the first flare of jealousy that sparked in him as soon as some other name crossed Jungkook’s lips, and he cursed himself for not asking, fast and honest, why is an exiled Prince of Uzam, on first-name basis with the Earth Prince himself, losing time hiding in the Great Forest with an irrelevant scoundrel like Taehyung.

Then, only two days later, Jungkook told him that he wants to talk about something very important and the proceeded to explain about the Night Lights. The Druids told him that there would be a night in the Great Forest when all the living things fed on ancient magic, a festival absent of humans of sorts, and while it was safe for a shifter like Jungkook, someone completely human would want to be away or high up, where the air wasn’t choked up with magic itself.

Taehyung didn’t know what “magic itself” meant, but he still found himself up on the highest branches of a tree, above the sea of green gradually sinking into darkness after a golden sunset. Jungkook was next to him, leaning against the tree trunk and twitching fingers next to Taehyung’s hand. Annoyed at the hesitant display of obvious affection, and perhaps encouraged by concern Jungkook showed for his well-being, Taehyung grabbed his hand and intertwined their fingers, like it was something they always did. Jungkook went completely still and then slowly relaxed, squeezing his hand with each breath coming out.

Taehyung wanted to look at him, so he turned and something in his peripheral vision made him jump and look back. The Forest was on fire with something, not sun nor moonlight, but luminescent and spreading from the east, where there was only dark. He yelped and was about to get up and pick Jungkook up, fly them away from whatever was coming, a wave of bright and exploding color, miles long, as far as the Forest reached. But Jungkook grabbed him around the waist now, firm and strong on the small of Taehyung’s back, and then he squeezed, gently guiding him back to sit down and lean on him.

“Those are the Night Lights. They can’t harm you this far up. You are safe.”, he whispered into Taehyung’s neck and, for the first time in his troubled life, Taehyung believed someone who said those words to him.

“The Druids called it bio luminescence, when the flowers bloom and all living things breathe out as one. A long time ago, magic users would come to the Forest to spend this night inside, to make them stronger, more connected to their shifting forms.”

Taehyung was mesmerized now, the wave of light almost reaching them, so close he could see it is made up of tiny sparkling stars swimming in the air, setting everything ablaze in shades of gold and bright purple. It smelled of the ocean, far away from land, and there was a hum of something, everything, surrounding them. The sparks touched Jungkook’s hand wrapped around Taehyung’s waist first, and it didn’t hurt or scorch, but simply sink in, setting his skin a shade of golden purple that Taehyung never saw before in his life. A moment later, it touched Taehyung too and it felt like a buzzing of tiny wings all over his body, like he could hear and sense and feel far beyond what his mortal eyes managed until now.

“You were waiting for this, weren’t you? That is why you stayed in the Forest for so long.”, he whispered and Jungkook nodded into his neck, timid and firm at the same time.

“Why are you not down there then? Absorbing the magic or whatever? That is what you came here to do, isn’t it?”

There was silence and then Jungkook’s voice rumbled like something wild, not human at all.

“It would have helped stabilize my shifting into a final form. And possibly turned me into something not human at all.”

Taehyung twisted around to stare at him in shock, mouth agape.

“Why would you ever do that?!”, he said loud, resounding around them, and Jungkook pulled him close again, shushing him with a stray finger pointed at his lips.

His eyes were ablaze, like someone shoved the light of the Forest into them and didn’t just reflect the sky anymore.

“Stay as quiet as you can. Down there, there are things nobody alive has ever seen. Ancient, powerful, painful. It wouldn’t be easy for me to fight them all of to save you. Please, until the morning, just… Trust me.”

Taehyung looked at him like he sees him for the first time, alight and consumed by magic, then moved closer still, until they were a simple breath apart and nothing could come between them, not even the sparks.

“Why don’t you want to stay human Jungkook?”, he whispered, and the sound of his name made the boy smile a bit, a hand squeezing over Taehyung’s back. There was something innocent in his face, unspoiled and completely endangered, for ghosts of a darker shade chased it around, never quite catching up.

“In many ways, I am already a monster. If I become one that can’t take human form, at least everyone I love will remain safe.”

They were the gentlest words Taehyung ever heard and still the most horrible.

“Safe from you?”, he asked and Jungkook nodded, like it was obvious.

Taehyung’s hands moved across his chest and up to grasp his face. It was precious, trusting, pure and scarred, but not monstrous. Not in wolf form, not now, not when angry and not when sad.

_What hurt you and show me how to kill it_, he wanted to say, but words were not easy now, faced with a wave of sadness he was swimming against, about to drown any second.

Jungkook was about to close his eyes and move away, but Taehyung wouldn’t let him, grasping at his cheeks and moving closer still, ever closer, until not even a breath could come between them.

“What about people who love you? Do you think they love a monster?”, he asked and Jungkook’s lips twitched, a silent shrug of his shoulder plenty of proof he never thought to ask that, not now and not in the past.

“Do you think I love a monster?”, Taehyung asked, grasping Jungkook’s hand and lifting it up to his own chest, across where his heart was beating a steady, calm, determined beat. He was not scared _of_ him, not of _loving_ him, but he was terrified of Jungkook not knowing who he was, who he became in the span of weeks.

His eyes widened, becoming broad pools of golden light and Taehyung wanted to stop whatever self-deprecating thing was about to come out of his mouth, so he leaned in, Forest and magic and the world be damned, he was going to kiss him and mean it and love him and show him that there is no monster under his fingertips.

But, a hand at his own chest stopped him, not pushing nor pulling, firm and strong as the rest of him.

“You will regret that. Don’t… spoil yourself. Or what you have with that boy you mentioned. It is fine. I will not turn tonight.”, Jungkook’s voice shook like a challenge, as if he can’t trust himself to say the words and Taehyung loved him more now than in any second before.

“I will not regret it. And you will never be a monster, turned or not. I love you.”, he said and Jungkook lost his breath too fast and audible, hands trembling back around Taehyung’s shoulders.

“Don’t say things like that.”, he whispered and Taehyung grinned, despite himself and the situation.

“Why not? I am not lying to you, and you seem to think you throwing this beautiful face of yours away is somehow going to save someone, but it is not. Not even you. You don’t need to be saved Jungkook. Nor does anyone need to be saved from you.”

“What do I need to do then?”, Jungkook asked, head tilting to the side a bit. He started to find this amusing too, now, and Taehyung decided to cling to that thread of happiness as much as he possibly could.

“You need to trust me and just look at the bloody lights. And let me kiss you.”, he tried again and Jungkook smiled at him, all teeth and a scrunched nose, and Taehyung considered flinging himself off the tree to cope with the cuteness.  
“I do trust you and I will look at the lights. But no kissing. You have someone who is waiting for you. It wouldn’t be fair to him.”

_Yes. Someone I loved first. Not less or different. Just… first._, Taehyung said to himself, looking away and towards the west, as if he could talk to Jimin from here and ask him, plead with him to understand. Understand _what_ he didn’t know, but the truth was he loved another already.

At some point of the night, the lights flared up and to the air where they sat, wrapped around each other and thetree branch, but Jungkook said they were not dangerous, so they didn’t move. It was a long ritual, but a short night, and as dawn started creeping down towards the world, the magic sizzled away and to the ground, like it was never there to begin with. Jungkook still held him, wrapped tight around Taehyung like he will drift away if he lets go.

“Are you sleeping?”, Taehyung whispered.

“No. Who would make sure you won’t fall off?”

“Idiot. I can fly.”

When they came down, Jungkook kept his distance for hours of contemplating something. Finally, he seemed to make a decision.

“There is a war coming.”, he was solemn and serious and Taehyung stared at him in shock.

“Excuse me?”

“The Fire Lord. My father. He is preparing an invasion.”, he looked down and away again, as if he carried the world of guilt on his shoulders.

“When?”, Taehyung asked.

“I don’t know. But I think the gathering of the royals in Rai is about that.”

Anxiety coursed through Taehyung like a downpour of cold rain.

War? He didn’t know anything about war. Nobody did for generations already. That was a thing of the past, what they overcame and forgot, or at least they should have.

“There are people between Uzam and Rai Jungkook. They will die as a casualty. We have to do something.”

“Yes.”, he said, as if he already knew that will be Taehyung’s answer to this.

“But how?”

“Allies. People or minor royals, the Earth King himself, whoever will listen. You can’t help people without other people.”, Jungkook answered and Taehyung agreed.

“Right. So off to Rai then.”

He would have walked away to gather whatever scattered thoughts he still had in his head after this, but Jungkook stopped him.

“Hey. I will go with you. To help I mean.”, he said, as if he was surprised to realize that. Taehyung looked at him in wonder, for it was clear to him they will be leaving together.

“Were you not planning to?”, he challenged and Jungkook stared at him.

“I was planning to stay away from the war, at all costs.”

Taehyung couldn’t pretend to understand that, as he couldn’t many things with Jungkook.

“What changed your mind then? You couldn’t get rid of your human form, so now you are off to war?”, he asked, harsher than he wanted to, but it aggravated him greatly that he bared his soul for Jungkook, only to be answered with confessions of prophetic conflicts.

He got a stare back, calculating and hidden, back behind whatever was broken of his walls last night. A slip up occurred only for a second, when he looked down Taehyung’s arms to where he was hugging himself, chilled and hungry in the forest morning, and a flash of worry went over his face.

_Tell me. Tell me you love me too, you idiot!_, Taehyung screamed at him from silent lips, stone-faced and fingers digging into his own sides, over the ghosts of where Jungkook held him the entire night.

“If I changed form, permanently or not, I would possibly become a monster. But if I walked away from this, I know I would be one already.”


	13. MAP/ I Hold With Those Who Favor Fire Cover




	14. I Hold With Those Who Favor Fire - Twice Burnt

_ **3.1 Jin/Hoseok / Twice Burnt** _

He dreamt of trees and the sky, a canopy of shapes he only saw on paintings before. Rai didn’t know of forests, and yet he smelled something he _knew_ to be a forest. That wasn’t the strangest part of the dreams though.

They cut out, between healers and shouting and nurses and the smell of flowers, someone’s slender fingers dancing over his hair and forehead, a voice whispering in his ear, all the things he knew of or about, from before.

And then there was the dreaming life, a long stretch of a road in front of his weary, well-traveled feet and the forest. Laughter, of someone he never heard laugh before, unprompted and gentle, echoing around the trees. The fur of some animal, long and dark purple, his own fingers combing through it, but when he looked closer, the hands were not his at all. He was in pain a lot, blossoming from his chest and away from the pain that radiated across his back and shoulders in his waking moments.

Then there were people, flashes of faces that ricocheted across his mind like they are sending him a message, and yet. He never saw any of them before. He was certain of it, not the pale, angelic-looking face of a man frowning and biting his lip, not the wandering gaze and chubby cheeks of a younger one, almost a boy. Especially not the elfish-looking one, with bright blue hair and angles about his face, the regal, unforgettable kind of perfection.

And also, Jungkook. He wasn’t surprised he dreamt of Jungkook, because _of course_ those eyes were never going to let him go. Even if they **did**, all too happily, in real life.

He reached out and towards him, trying to ask who the other people are and why are they popping up in Jin’s head now, through the haze of medication and pain and all the soft, tender things he knew are real.

There was no answer. Jungkook looked at him, a dream in a dream, but never showed any sign of seeing him at all. And that was perplexing, because this was a dream in Jin’s own head, and that head knew that people dream only of faces and places they have seen before, and also that Jungkook couldn’t bluff to save his life. Why would it feed him lies, again and over again, every time he fainted from the medication or actual pain?

Then, the gentle hand on his forehead was replaced with firm, cold fingers he recognized as Mother’s, and she held them there for a long time. She moved something around him, pillows or whatever they kept him laying on his front on, and then she was gone, but so was the gentle hand. The smell of flowers intensified, but Jin didn’t want to wake up completely yet. He was aware of the pain at his back, and he remembered the source of it too, and was scared of it hurting again, them coming for him and finishing what they started.

Eventually, his eyes opened on his own. It was night, he could sense the colder cave air illuminated by candles and a sleepy nurse was fluffing up the pillows right in front of his face when he blinked his eyes. She stepped back and shouted something, shaking a bit and squealing like nails on glass. Then, someone ran in the room and jumped into his line of vision and _that_ face he knew. It was, unforgettably, the last thing he saw before darkness after getting hurt.

He tried speaking but only mumbling came out, with a bit of very undignified drool. There was something in his mouth, tucked between his teeth, and his lips were parched, cracked and tingly.

“Easy, easy… Are you in pain?”, Hoseok asked, face close enough to inspect Jin’s irises and he was still beautiful, utterly so, hair sticking out in all directions and blemishes that stay after tear tracks all over his cheeks, but still. Glorious, he was.

Jin managed to shake his head a bit when Hoseok repeated his question and then he felt the hands on his face again, fingers unmistakably ones he felt playing with his hair earlier.

“I will take the guard out of your mouth then. They only put it in because they were afraid you will bite your tongue off if you wake up in pain, but then they gave you so much medication you just ended up drooling everywhere.”

Jin tried to frown, but his rigid jaw was trying to remember how to stop biting on the polished wooden stick they placed in his mouth and then he got confused about why he wanted to frown in the first place.

“Try to drink some water?”, Hoseok offered, a cup in his hands entering Jin’s vision, and that is when he noticed the bandages on Hoseok’s forearms, pink and red in parts, like there is something bleeding through. He yelped, the sound ripping through his dry throat like a scratch of old paper and then he was coughing, lungs pressed against the bed.

“Hey, what the hell!”, Hoseok shouted and hurried to lift him up a bit, managing a few centimetres before bringing the cup back to his lips.

Gulping air and water together, Jin soothed his throat and leaned into Hoseok, waiting to be put down.

“They will put you up later, I think, as soon as the nurse finds the healers… They will kick me out, but I will be back first thing in the morning, I swear.”

Jin blinked awake again, lazy eyelids refusing to obey him and Hoseok’s face was swimming in and out of focus. He wanted to sit up and ask about the bandages, vaguely remembering that Hoseok’s arms were exposed to the flames on the sides of his own back, and was he not in pain and was that actually blood?

But the world was getting away from him again, and the forest canopy was coming closer again, familiar and dreamy. He heard Hoseok saying that he should sleep now and then shouting people running towards them, but that was already hidden behind the crisp morning in the woods and the purple fur he was snuggled into.

The room was much brighter when he came to his senses the next time. Dreams left his mind with a finality, already slipping away from his thoughts the way they usually do when you are fully awake. When he opened his eyes, the room was candle-lit and he was sitting up on the bed this time, leaning forward on an improvised stand so his back can stay free of covers. And there was pain, from his back and shoulders, more intense and real than before, up close instead of far away.

Hoseok was sleeping in a chair next to the bed, curled up and with bandaged hands hugging his own knees. It looked uncomfortable sitting like that, so Jin tried to reach out and touch him to uncurl and lie down on the bed next to him. As soon as he moved, his skin was on fire again and he shouted out, making Hoseok jump up.

“What is happening?! Are you hurt?! Should I move you?”, he blabbed and Jin waved his head weakly to indicate a “no”.

“They said you shouldn’t move too much until the salve on your back absorbs properly. Might take a few hours though.”

Jin looked at him, gaze fixed at the bandages, which were white and spotless now.

“Oh. These scared you before, didn’t they? It is just a salve though, not blood. Your back looks much worse, trust me. But it just takes time to heal, nothing more.”, he bit his lip and looked behind Jin, where the wound was, as if he is checking the size.

“Ugh.”, Jin croaked in response. Words were clear in his head now, but far from leaving his mouth.

“I heal faster than you apparently. Something about Fire Folk being difficult to hurt with fire itself, even if they were the assassins sent from the South.”

He waited until Hoseok came back into his field of sight before raising an eyebrow, mumbling sounds out that he tried to shape into: “What happened?”.

“The Sword of Six Whips is the signature of the South Fire Kingdom. It was a message and an assassination attempt. Apparently, they don’t want for anyone else to mark themselves as a Fire Lord.”

Jin’s head snapped up at that, tilting in question. His throat was slowly warming up, but only mumbles were coming out still.

“It wasn’t you they wanted to kill. According to my very panicked friend Wonho, this was a perfect opportunity to remove me, as a warning and all… They didn’t count on you trying to die in order to save my life though.”

Jin’s lips twitched in a smile, almost involuntary, as he was growing accustomed to smile around Hoseok.

“Oh, your court is enjoying it too much now. All the nurses have been gossiping for days about how you chose such a heroic courtship announcement to win my hand.”, Hoseok leaned in, full-blown smile lifting his lips into a heart-shaped imprint of sunlight itself and Jin tried to smile back with all his might. Sunlight was his favorite luxury in the entire world.

“How… long...”, he managed to speak out finally, obvious glee at his own success blossoming over his face.

“Two weeks. They kept you under most of the time. King Taeon wouldn’t let me come visit at first. Said he didn’t trust me to not finish the job of the Fire bastards myself.”, Hoseok looked away from him then, as if there is several pages of skipped material there, but Jin didn’t move or look away from him.

“Eventually, I convinced them that I simply wanted to come express my gratitude. Which I was, of course.”

“How...”, Jin managed again, coughing at the end of it.

“Oh, I told your mother and father that you saved my life because you obviously expressed interest in having my hand in marriage. And how could they keep me away from you when I already accepted?”, Hoseok said, glee and mischief battling for dominance in his expression and if Jin could lift his hand, he would have slapped them both in exasperation.

“I am joking, obviously. I didn’t bind us in marriage promises, just cried and shouted until your Father let me do what I wanted. Surprisingly effective that is, to annoy foreign royalty into letting you get your way.”

Jin shook his head a bit, absolutely convinced he knew how that particular conversation went already. Hoseok looked back at him now, a challenge in his eyes and something serious creeping behind his smiling expression.

He stepped towards Jin and took his face between his fingers, tenderly, like one would do to a lover. Or so Jin imagined it would be, if he ever had a lover.

“Thank you. I can say it person now, eye to eye, not in front of an audience of your family and the entire court.”, his eyes amplified every word.

“You really didn’t have an obligation of saving me at all, and yet you did, and I have no way to promise you that I would do the same for you, but I would, I _do_ promise.”

Jin gaped at him like a fish, more dazed and confused by the earnest, serious Hoseok, whose lips didn’t twitch into a smile every other second. His hair was combed and on the side of his forehead now, Jin just noticed, making him look dangerously, mind-numbingly handsome.

Somewhere, in the back of Jin’s mind, there was little voice telling him off for thinking about the perfect arch of Hoseok’s eyebrows while the man was trying to express gratitude for a feat that apparently nearly cost Jin his life, but… When it came to gorgeous, honest men, Jin was a lost cause.

“Well, I lie, I do know how to promise.”, he said, a smile across his perfect face again, as it should be.

And then he was leaning in and kissing him, cracked lips and all, with urgency and gentleness, barely a touch of lips on Jin’s, all princely and tender. A large gasp climbed up Jin’s throat and squeezed his way out, so he swooned like a storybook princess being kissed for the very first time by the handsome hero who saved her kingdom.

Because he was. Being kissed for the very first time, that is. There were no kingdoms at stake, or maybe all of them were, but Jin didn’t care all, touched by direct, magnificent sunlight, gentle and ethereal as Hoseok was.

* * *

Hoseok’s uncle, the King of the Great Fire Kingdom was a paranoid man, and the entire royal family followed suit in the scope of fears they coveted behind closed doors. Their greatest demon was the South Fire Kingdom and its deadly, evil Lord Jeon, a menace so serious it was used to scare children into obeying their parents all across the mainland.

“They kill with no remorse and conquer, pillage, rape and take if nobody stands up to them. It is our duty to always, _always_ stand up to them.”, Hoseok’s mother thought him, a fierce general on her own, expecting her only son to follow the family tradition into military greatness.

Alas, she was of no such luck. Hoseok called bullshit on these imaginary evil men from the south that they all trained to meet and fight, and then chose repeatedly to stay behind walled cities and in safe fortresses, so the famous courage stayed in stories and clearly separated from reality.

He paid dearly for his mistrust in the monsters of their folk tales, because all the youth was expected to dedicate their lives to the good, necessary fight against these ghosts, and even if Hoseok chose to not participate, others didn’t have their choice. The King or his parents couldn’t make him personally, but they did everybody around him. That is how he was left with no friends besides Wonho. Sometimes, the punishment for his lack of compliance was even more evident. Hoseok’s childhood sweetheart, a boy who he shared first kisses and awkward handjobs in what he thought was secrecy got assigned to serve as the King’s personal food taster, forever mortified and distant now, when dying first and in warning was his actual job. His next boyfriend became the royal executioner. And so on, until he stopped looking at people around him for affection, terrified that they will give it to him, and, in turn, pay by ruined, murdered lives.

But still, Hoseok wanted to see the world, and it would be just his luck that, as soon as he stepped out to do it, the first assassination attempt in years was placed on his head.

Turns out the years of training and sharp reflexes were worth fuck all though, because no flames rose to defend Hoseok himself against the deadly whips of South Fire. It was only the body of an Earth Prince that saved him, willingly thrown just right, so he almost went out of the entire ordeal unscathed. But that didn’t seem right or just at all, and Jin’s eyes held the goodness of all foolish heroes of this world in them when they widened in pain, so certain they were saving a worthy life, and Hoseok just couldn’t take it. Rage, pure, liquid, searing white exploded in him and then, apparently, out of him.

He would never forget the force with which the bodies of the South Fire assassins flew away from them, like puppets on invisible strings. Jin fainted from the pain, but the rest of the room, the soldiers, guards, Wonho, Shae, they all witnessed the carnage leftover when Hoseok put his outstretched hands down.

There was blood on all four walls of the great cave, and one of the men was hanging from the chandelier in the middle, impaled on the metal spikes that were decorative until Hoseok found a different purpose for them. Mortified, the Earth King fell completely silent with his orders, for his throne room was covered in blood and guts of men he couldn’t identify now, not unless he wanted to chase runaway eyeballs around the dark corners of the Rai cave system. All six of them were dead from the moment the force of Hoseok’s power hit them, obviously not shouting while the rest of it trashed them around like paper birds. The Earth Queen was hiding behind her own throne, running away from a stray limb that was ripped off and thrown in her direction.

Hoseok held onto Jin until the healers ripped his limp body away from him, and then stood up like a scorned child, unaware still that he committed mass murder. It wasn’t what he wanted. There were no things he wanted, no plan to his visit here at all, and yet everybody looked at him like he is the biggest monster alive. Wonho grabbed him and pushed him towards the exit out of the chamber, a moment before reality hit home and he started hyperventilating. It took hours afterwards for his lungs to work, and days for tears to stop.

“That wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, I don’t know what the fuck happened, it wasn’t me...”, he repeated over and over and only Wonho listened to him and nodded back, trying in vain to calm him down. Later, Wonho explained that officials of the Earth Kingdom came to their rooms to question Hoseok a total of ten times, each time running away from Shae or Wonho himself, before they just stopped and left them alone.

Much later, when he finally calmed down and started to breathe normally, Wonho was lying on him, the pressure apparently connected to normal breathing rhythms.

“I thought they killed you. Remind me to kiss that Prince of yours as a thank you.”, Wonho said when he noticed Hoseok is back in the land of comprehension.

“Instead, _I_ killed them. I massacred people Wonho.”, Hoseok said, hiding his face away in shame, utter disgust with himself making him want to puke.

“Yes. And thank all the Gods that you did, or they would have killed everyone in that room that stood between them and you, and then also you. For nothing. To threaten a King that cares about you so little he sent you here knowing this might happen.”

Wonho was bitter about the Kingdom he was raised to protect, obviously so, but he refused to talk about it, claiming it is his duty to protect Hoseok only, and Shae jumped on him every time he tried reasoning with her or his servant that they should run away.

“I can do things I can’t control. How is that not a threat big enough for you to leave?!”, Hoseok shouted at them, but neither would budge. After a while, it felt like he is having the same conversation with himself only, and the rest of the world ignored him.

Then, he asked to see Jin and the Earth King showed some common sense in forbidding it. But Hoseok wouldn’t let it go. He kept thinking about the moment when his powers manifested themselves, and even while Jin was the first in the blast zone, there was nothing on him that looked hurt by Hoseok at all. His eyes were scared and determined and his body on Hoseok’s certain and firm, but he never hesitated for a second. And he must have realized what Hoseok did, for he got hit by the fire whips only twice, enough to damage his skin and flesh so severely they needed to sedate him for weeks. But if the third and the fourth whip landed on him, he would’ve been dead. And there was no stopping the Six Whips attack from the outside once it started. The only way you fought a ring of fire, if you could, was to burn it out from the inside, like a hurricane imploding on itself. And people couldn’t do that. At least people that were not Hoseok couldn’t.

In the end, that realization, that he saved Jin’s life by killing others, is what got him out of his rooms and into a determined quest to get to the Earth Prince. It took days, but when he finally managed, nobody dared disturb him.

“You know, when I said you should scare them, I didn’t also mean petrify. Somewhere between flirting and complete terrorizing, that is the sweet spot. Aim for that next time.”, Wonho told him, completely over the breakdowns and panic attacks, or at least he pretended to be so.

Then, Jin woke up, and Hoseok found himself being brave enough to keep coming back, kisses and holding hands and all the other stupid things that deadly people like him shouldn’t do with future kings. But Jin was an adorable mess of a hero, Hoseok’s personal savior and he still looked at Hoseok like he is worth saving.

“Why did you do it though?”, Hoseok asked him, days after he was released from the healer’s care and allowed to wander the caves without supervision. They stuck together like glue, rumors already flying around that there will be a wedding soon, and wasn’t that just a perfectly ridiculous idea.

Jin has his head in Hoseok’s lap, enjoying being fussed over and hand-fed fruits, like he conquered an ancient kingdom and not just Hoseok’s heart.

“Well, I thought to myself that I really want you to be the first person ever to kiss me, and then it just made sense, you know?”, Jin said, and the caves might as well have collapsed on Hoseok’s head.

“What the fuck are you talking about?! You are the Earth Prince, surely there have been suitors upon suitors fighting over...”, he blabbed, but Jin shot up from where he was lying in his lap and shut him up. His lips were soft, intoxicating and alluring in that way sculptures of ancient beauties are, so to make you understand why the Gods waged wars for a single kiss thousands of years ago. Hoseok felt possessed by this immediate, encompassing need to hold him close and smiling, happy and relaxed, to stay and promise a lifetime to those twinkling eyes and contagious laughter. And he did. Stupidly, he did, at least with actions, caresses and kisses.

“I don’t regret it being you. Or saving you. I don’t know why they wanted to kill you, but you are a good man Hoseok. Maybe I just didn’t want a bit of warmth to leave this world. Or maybe I would have jumped in front of anybody in that situation. Who knows. Does it matter?”, Jin said and Hoseok stared at him, lost in questions about this wonder of a Prince.

“Even if it doesn’t matter… What do you want from me Jin?”, he asked, trying for honesty as the last card before he lost whatever game they weren’t playing.

“I want you to love me. If you want to.”, Jin answered, timid and looking at Hoseok like he is gambling everything, again, and not caring how it will inevitably hurt, eventually. Hoseok wanted to promise it wouldn’t, a love that will never harm, but the words got stuck before he managed to blab them out. He kept quiet, for once, and promised what he feared he couldn’t deliver in the only way he knew how.

Jin’s skin was pale and glowing in the sunlight Hoseok managed to generate in the darkness of the cave, and they were hidden from sight of everyone well enough to brave touches under clothes and there was nobody there to stop them. His touch was gentle and firm at the same time and Hoseok’s stomach trembled, as well as his arms and fingers. He touched nevertheless, all across Jin’s shoulders and down his exposed chest, over and into his pants, until the Prince was gasping and trembling under him, cock leaking all over his hand.

His head was thrown back so Hoseok lounged at the delicious expanse of skin at his neck and sucked bruises there, an array of marks that signed his adoration the best he knew. Jin gasped and moaned and melted under him like a delicious sin and then his hurried hands trembled over Hoseok’s clothes, grabbing to remove.

“Off… Take if off, please...”, he breathed and Hoseok grinned against his neck and listened to the order the Prince gave him.

Jin hurried to touch him and take his pants off too, hurrying like the lack of skin on skin contact would hurt.

“What do you want me to do my Prince? Tell me.”, Hoseok whispered and Jin morphed into a beast of blown pupils and fidgeting hands under him, suddenly all to aware that he has to speak in order to receive.

“Fuck me. What else, genius?”, he said finally, braving a tone that clearly contrasted his trembling body.

“As you wish.”  
And Hoseok did, lying him down on pillows stolen from his room, kissing and licking his way down to where Jin timidly pushed him, like he wants to ask but forgot to speak now. He opened him up slowly, milking sounds and gasps with probing fingers and even a bit of laughter when Jin shouted at him that he won’t break with a bit of fucking, so if he could please get on with it.

When he finally pushed inside, stopping the delicious heat swallowing him up to check if Jin was in any discomfort, the Prince grabbed his shoulders and slammed himself down, so Hoseok lit up in sunlight he couldn’t control at all, gasping for breath and swearing profusely, his eyes rolling back and fingers grabbing onto Jin’s shoulders.

“Fuck, you will kill me!”, he managed and Jin laughed in response, looking at Hoseok like he would give him the world if he could and almost making him come on the spot.

“No, I will save your life, apparently. Now make it worth my while and fuck me, will you?”

He didn’t need to ask the fourth time. Hoseok used whatever wits he had about him and tried his best, even if it costed him energy he had to borrow from his dead ancestors.

And he managed, for when Jin came, twisting under and around him like a tight, irresistible menace, the walls of the cave actually shook and dust fell from the cracks in stone all around them. Apparently, fucking someone who can command earth itself made them lose the grip on it.

Jin surged up and towards him, hugging him close and moaning into his mouth, obviously beyond himself, and it was the sexiest thing Hoseok ever experienced, raw and shameless and honestly magnificent. A mere second later, he was coming into the Earth Prince, kissing him to drown his own screams of pleasure and disbelief, for he didn’t know there was a possibility he would somehow fall more in love with him.

“Rocked your world, huh?”, he teased when they caught their thoughts and breaths, snuggled close and him going soft in Jin, careful not to move too much or the delicious feeling would transition straight into pain.

“Idiot.”, Jin said, smacking him weakly over the head, but actually just resting his fingers among Hoseok’s sweaty locks, pulling him closer still, as if that was in any way possible.

“Yeah, well… your idiot.”, he said, and this time the words went out with no problems, like he couldn’t stop them even if he wanted to.

Days later (and a few adventures in secret affairs that were apparently not secret at all), Wonho interrupted them having breakfast in Hoseok’s rooms to announce that a delegation from Hoseok’s uncle came to check on the state of their attacked Fire Prince and offer support in numbers.

“Send them back.”, Hoseok said, a cold dread dripping down his neck at the very thought that they remembered him too late to save his life and just soon enough to check was he actually dead. The Great Fire Kingdom had a lot of contenders to the throne, and while Hoseok wasn’t very high up that list, that was before he manifested a new type of deadly power in front of foreign officials like he invented it himself. This put a target on his back from everyone paranoid to see him as a threat, and his uncle was at the top of the list. Wonho agreed with him that there were plenty of points one could prove with a dead Fire Lord at their feet, for warning or revenge alike.

“They won’t listen to me. You have to make that statement in person.”, Wonho said, bowing to him and Jin on his way out.

So Hoseok did, leaving Jin in the shadows of his rooms to face a delegation that even contained two cousins of his.

“The King is offering you full support in all matters Prince Hoseok. The South bastards will pay for this offense to the Great Fire Kingdom.”, one of them said, stepping forward like a timid, trembling lamb in front of a hunter.

Hoseok was not used to people being afraid of him, nor did he like it, but now he apparently needed to accept it.

“ I don’t need support from him. You can deliver that message without me needing to write it down, can you?”

The messenger squinted at him, as if he expected the brat he came to advise to be insufferable.

“ Nevertheless, the Great Fire Kingdom stands behind their people. It would be a devastating thing to have our own royalty chewed up and spit out as an unnecessary warning or display of power. What a pointless way to die.”

Hoseok looked at him unblinking and trying to hide the magnitude of fear that obvious threat moved in him. He tried to remember how pure sunlight felt cursing through him, when he couldn’t control it but could use it to harm for his own interest and it magically worked to calm him down. Stupid and innocent he might have been, walking into this trap, but powerless he certainly wasn’t.

“Tell him that if they want to chew _me_ up, there is no chance in hell I would let them spit me out before making them choke on _all_ of me.”


End file.
